Ethics & Community Aid

As a gourmet coffee company, we partner with coffee growers all over the world. When we first began travelling to their farms, we talked to the workers, explored the communities, and we encountered a way of life most people would prefer not to think about as they sip their morning cup of coffee. But we couldn’t stop thinking about it.

The farm workers were struggling to feed their own children, even as they toiled to provide the world’s richest countries with the second largest commodity on Earth, after oil. As we thought about the children of the coffee farmers, and about our own children, we realized that their fates - and the fates of all the world’s children - are connected. If we wanted to leave them a better planet, then we had to take action where we could. We set up our Community Aid program (then called “Source Aid”) in 1989, and since then, we have invested several million dollars to improve the quality of life for the farmers and communities where our coffee is grown.

Today, when you enjoy your morning cup of coffee from the Organic Coffee Company or any of the Rogers Family brands, you can take comfort knowing that the farmers who made that coffee possible are treated with respect and paid fairly - in no small part thanks to you.

Community Aid is run on three key tenets:

Care for Farmers

We set up long-term contracts that allow farmers to treat their employees fairly, improve the environment and make a reasonable profit for their hard work. We consider the costs of production, infrastructure, and maintenance, as well as the need for a reasonable profit.

Care for the Community

Last year our investment in the Coffee Community Aid program was almost £408,000; and this year’s budget is just under £583,000. These funds go to education, nutrition, and healthcare programs that help break the cycle of poverty in our partner coffee growing communities, and improve the quality of life for the workers and their families. From 2001 to 2007, we constructed 18 schools, 125 bathrooms, 119 housing units, 12 clinics, and 52 kitchens, in communities like La Victoria, Mexico, Kotowa, Panama, and Las Lajas, Nicaragua. To learn exactly what went where, click here.

Care for the Environment

We practice “responsible farming,” which means shade-grown, organic coffee, and farmlands with large areas left in their natural state, so that the ecosystem can continue to thrive around us. Responsible farming not only makes for superior coffee, it helps keep the land, people, and wildlife healthy everywhere our coffee is grown. We employ natural, sustainable methods, like using 10,000,000,000 worms to turn coffee farm waste into 5,000 pounds of pure fertilizer each week.

We work directly with our partner coffee growers and their communities to oversee the distribution of funds from Community Aid. We pay the invoices ourselves, making sure that every dollar goes directly to things like cement and lumber, used to build schools. To see exactly where and how funds are spent, see our Community Aid map.