In Gear | Rotary in Southern New Zealand In Gear - Issue 3 | Page 18

They started
thinking about
coffee way
back down the
production line.
“To be honest,
we just sent out
an email, and it
bounced around
some organisations
around the world,
when it was just
this dream, this
wild dream …
young people
saying: ‘Hey,
wouldn’t it be cool
to do this?’
“And, then we got
a response, and
it happened to be
from the mecca of
coffee in Mexico,
which was incredible.
Epifanio, a farm owner with The Lucy Foundation, inspects his coffee cherries.
“We had a local group who said they worked with
people with disabilities there, and that they’d tried
some other things to get them engaged with inclusion
and human rights, but felt the thing they were missing
was they weren’t engaging them around coffee, but
rather things like crafts, which, again, takes me back to
this idea of charity.”
After a painstaking scoping process, a social enterprise
evolved, partnering The Lucy Foundation with coffee
farmers and their families from Pluma Hidalgo, Oaxaca,
which was home to a progeny of an heirloom variety
of Typica coffee. Their shared goal? Exporting coffee
beans to New Zealand.
The premium coffee is the all-important vehicle, Robbie
says, to produce so many other benefits, from social
and environment to financial.
“There is still a place for hand-outs and charity. But, we
want to take it further and include that, but have it as
part of a bigger picture.
“You’ve got the give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a week;
teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime parable.
The social enterprise model says a social entrepreneur
wants to revolutionise the fishing industry. So, we’re
applying that to coffee – we want to revolutionise the
way we produce the product, because this is about
sustainability,” Robbie says.
A key first priority is strengthening the heirloom coffee
plants, compromised by a hurricane several years
ago that brought salt water from the ocean into the
mountains, altering the pH of the soil.
“Because the farmers are, for the most part, illiterate,
they didn’t respond to the new environment, and didn’t
put new practices in place for the new pH level, so their
plants became weak. Then you’ve got ‘la roya’ – a rust
on the leaves that has gone right through Latin America
destroying crops, and you’ve got a little bug that
burrows into the coffee bean.
“All of these factors mean that this beautiful type of
coffee that is only grown in this area, that is very special
and an heirloom variety, is at risk of extinction. And,
because of this, the farmers are having to abandon
their land in search of work to put food on the table.
“We’ve got one family we’re working with where mum
is very unwell; they think it’s diabetes. She can’t afford
the medications. She’s got two men who are mute, deaf
with learning disabilities at home ... her sons. She’s
looking after her grandchild, and dad works six days
a week for a total of $NZ50. This is why he can’t work
their land – they’ve got land, quite a bit of land, actually,
but it doesn’t provide a quick enough return.”
Sustainability first
Robbie and her team are determined their approach
remains holistically ethical and adheres faithfully to a
three-pronged approach to sustainability: Respecting
Page 18 | In Gear - Rotary in southern New Zealand - District 9980 | www.rotarydistrict9980.org