Fairly Traded Coffee

Fairly Traded through Community Aid

Poverty is a very real problem in many coffee-growing regions of the world. To address the problem, we started Community Aid - in essence, a mini Peace Corps - that's been keeping our partner, coffee-farming communities vibrant since 1994. The program is supported by your purchase of our products, so you make a real difference in the lives of the people who grow our coffee.

Our Community Aid program is made up of 3 key elements: care for farmers, care for the community and workers, and care for the environment.

Care for Farmers

We set up long-term, fixed-price contracts that help farmers through coffee price ups and downs. We pay on average 70p per pound which is considerably higher than the minimum Fair Trade certification price of 65p. With vibrant farms, farmers and workers are able to stay near their families rather than migrate to big cities to find work. This leads to well-tended coffee trees that produce only the very highest quality coffee beans.

Care for the Community & Workers

We spend upwards of £257,000 a year towards breaking the cycle of poverty through direct support of educational, nutritional, and healthcare programs in our partner coffee communities. Over the years, we've built healthcare clinics, schools, daycares, and improved worker housing. Visit the Rogers Family Company website to see our Community Aid Map and specific projects implemented. We work directly with communities to oversee the proper distribution of funds, rather than simply sending money and hoping the funds are spent on development efforts. In this way, we know exactly where and how our funds are being spent.

Care for the Environment

We practice shade grown and organic farming which keeps the workers, their families, and the environment healthy. You may be wondering why we started our Community Aid program, and why spend such a considerable amount of money and time on the program. You may also be wondering how the differences between the Fair Trade coffee certification and Community Aid.

Why Community Aid?

Community Aid helps us develop long-term relationships with our partner coffee farms and the surrounding communties. A reliable, high quality, supply of green coffee is vitally important to our business. But it's also deeper than that.

In 1994 when we started visiting the farms and communities where our coffee was being grown, we simply couldn't ignore the dire poverty we encountered. Back home, we couldn't forget the innocence in children’s eyes and the despair in their parents hearts.

Hope for our children’s future is the common bond between all parents no matter what nationality, and though we speak different languages and come from different cultures, we all simply want the best for our kids in the future. As our world becomes smaller, the future of children in far away lands and that of our own children are converging. We decided to do something tangible to make that future a beautiful one for everyone. Community Aid is a small step towards breaking the cycle of poverty and helping make the future brighter for our friends.

What are the Differences (and similarities) between Community Aid and Fair Trade?

First let's start with the similarities. Both Community Aid and Fair Trade strive to help break the cycle of poverty in coffee-growing lands. Both programs promote long-term fixed contracts and direct imports from farmers to bypass middlemen.

The problem with Fair Trade is that not all coffee farms are small enough to be organized into cooperatives (a prerequisite for farmers participating in Fair Trade). Many large coffee farms with which we do business often hire the local, indigenous population to work on their farms. So, when importing coffee from a farm that is not small (and therefore not a member of a Fair Trade cooperative), it is impossible to get Fair Trade certificate for the coffee. But poverty is still a problem for the local community and the workers on the large farms.

Unique to the coffee industry, our company's Community Aid Program fills this void that cannot be addressed by Fair Trade. On over 20 farms in Central America and Mexico, we've improved worker housing, built or replaced schools, created daycares and nutrition programs for children, and built clinics. We even pay for doctor's and teacher's salaries when there were formerly no staff.

Still interested in learning more? Visit the Rogers Family Company website to see the projects in detail.