Pioneer for Kids in Coffee-Growing Communities
By Richard Wolak
Bill Fishbein is the founder of Coffee Kids, established in 1988 by Bill, the owner of Coffee Exchange, a specialty coffee roaster and retailer in Providence, Rhode Island. That year, Bill had traveled to Guatemala and saw first-hand the connection between coffee farming and poverty. He created Coffee Kids as a way for coffee businesses and coffee consumers to give something back to the families who grow coffee.
Bill has been in the coffee business since 1977. When he visited coffee-farming families in Guatemala in 1988 he discovered the extent of the poverty in the area. On his return he started Coffee Kids, since then thousands of individuals and coffee businesses have supported Coffee Kids projects, which focuses on health care, education, and diversifying income for coffee-farming families.
COFFEE KIDS has helped thousands of children, women, and men in coffee-producing regions in Mexico and Central America to improve the quality of their lives and build more sustainable communities. Coffee Kids is an international nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization. Their staff works with local non-governmental community organizations in Latin America to create education, health-care, training, and microenterprise programs for coffee farmers and their families. Our projects respect the cultural integrity of our local partners, foster independence, and promote long-term self-sufficiency. What is Coffee Kids' mission? To improve the quality of life for children and families who live in coffee-growing communities around the world.
Coffee Kids currently works in five countries: Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Peru. Several thousand families in over a hundred communities benefit from Coffee Kids' programs.
In the future they hope to be able to expand their work into countries such as Honduras and El Salvador that neighbor those where they already work.
They are also planning a series of exchanges and training sessions where representatives from there various partner organizations can get together and share ideas and experiences. In this way, they hope to see there various programs cross-pollinate from community to community and from country to country. Their long-term goal is to foster and support sustainable community development in as many coffee-growing communities as possible.
POSTED: Friday, June 08, 2007