"As you sip your morning coffee or enjoy that afternoon espresso, do you ever think about where coffee comes from?" says Coffee Kids founder, Bill Fishbein, the owner of Coffee Exchange, a specialty coffee roaster and retailer in Providence, RI. "Around the world, literally millions of people dedicate their lives to growing coffee. Unfortunately, the blessings of coffee don't always filter down to the people who grow it. Coffee farmers earn as little as a penny-a-pound for their harvest, and even during the years when crops do well and prices are high, the children of coffee growers go without much that we take for granted. Twelve years ago, I traveled to Guatemala and came face to face with the reality of coffee and poverty. When I returned home, I founded Coffee Kids as a way for coffee drinkers and coffee related businesses to give something back to the families who grow coffee."
Bill has a wonderful nonprofit plan going here. Coffee Kids currently works in four countries: Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Several thousand families in over a hundred communities benefit from Coffee Kids' programs. Their mission: to improve the quality of life for children and families who live in coffee-growing communities around the world.
Every Coffee Kids program has a local partner organization. In Mexico their partner is AUGE (Desarrollo Autogestionario/Self-Managed Development). In Guatemala they work primarily with APROS (Asociación de Promotoras de Salud de San Pedro/San Pedro Women's Health Collective. In Costa Rica and Nicaragua, much of Coffee Kids' work is coordinated through COOCAFE and CECOCAFEN, which are all regional consortiums of democratically run coffee cooperatives.
Bill says, "The problems associated with coffee and poverty exist in almost every tropical country in the world. Coffee Kids hopes that some day we will be able to help address the pressing needs in many other coffee-growing countries, but for now, Coffee Kids is focusing on having well-run programs in a few countries rather than spreading ourselves too thin."
Coffee Kids' largest program is the women's microcredit program. This program is designed to help provide economic stability and diversification. Coffee Kids helps establish micro-credit groups that encourage saving and provide access to small, low-interest loans. Each group issues loans to its members who use their capital to start or expand their own small businesses. Examples of these businesses are: a general store, a midwife's clinic and a pharmacy, a beauty salon, a fried food stand, and a pig raising business. During weekly meetings, group members receive training on topics such as accounting and business management and each group conducts the business of making loan payments, collecting savings deposits and issuing new loans. A portion of the interest income of each group covers its expenses and the rest is channeled into a collective savings fund. As each community bank's savings fund grows, the group borrows less money from Coffee Kids and more from itself. Eventually, the community bank becomes an official, independent credit cooperative and the capital is cycled into the start-up for a new group. This is a sophisticated program that gives a hand up, not a hand out.
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