Profiling our friends who live, eat and breathe fair trade in producer communities.
You've seen this saying on our packaging Direct Fair Trade means getting involved. What does getting involved look like? For us, it means lots of visiting and listening and then it means lots of furrowed brows, brainstorming and questions and finally it means supporting our partners with time, energy, money and other resources to create solutions.
A few examples of these efforts are Famicafe, Fruandes, Traceability to Origin and the Tanzanian Hope Project. These initiatives are outside of paying a fair price for a commodity. They represent the side of fair trade that is the outcome of our direct relationships with producer, they are harder to quantify and cause us to be more emotionally involved than we would be otherwise. On the flip side, these initiatives keep our trade relationship in perspective and our eye on our mission.
Famicafé
Fundación Familias Cafeteras, Famicafé (Coffee Families Foundation) is a registered Colombian non-profit, non-governmental organization dedicated to improving the lives of families in the coffee growing region of Colombia. Famicafe is a hands-on, on the ground, organization that invests in education, job creation and organic farming initiatives.
Fruandes
Fruandes Ltda. is a Colombian Fair Trade Organization started by Level Ground Trading in 2002. Seed capital, business expertise and training were supplied in order to establish a company that would provide a fair market for fruit grown by small-scale farmers and employment for disadvantaged women in Bogotá, Colombia.
Traceability to Origin Project
In 2005, Level Ground Trading and Juan Velez, a Colombian agronomist, began to work closely with twenty-five small-scale coffee farming families who grow Café San Miguel with several objectives in mind:
- Pay premium prices for their coffee based on cup quality and socio-economic conditions
- Offer technical assistance in organic farming methods
- Transfer knowledge of cup quality to farmers
- Invest in education for their children
- Create a direct link from producers to consumers
Tanzanian Hope Project
Mamas at the Mlowo coffee milling plant near Mbeya, Tanzania participate in a micro-insurance plan funded by Level Ground Trading. The plan covers basic medical care for over 100 mamas and their families at the Mbeya Hospital.
