Grounds for Empowerment Archives - EmoryBusiness.com https://www.emorybusiness.com/tag/grounds-for-empowerment/ Insights from Goizueta Business School Tue, 16 Jul 2024 19:17:39 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://www.emorybusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/eb-logo-150x150.jpeg Grounds for Empowerment Archives - EmoryBusiness.com https://www.emorybusiness.com/tag/grounds-for-empowerment/ 32 32 From Farm to Cup: Goizueta Students Gain Firsthand Insight into Sustainable Coffee Production in Guatemala https://www.emorybusiness.com/2023/04/06/from-farm-to-cup-goizueta-students-gain-firsthand-insight-into-sustainable-coffee-production-in-guatemala/ Thu, 06 Apr 2023 21:59:40 +0000 https://www.emorybusiness.com/?p=27202 Most coffee consumers don’t see past the barista and espresso machine as they partake in their daily ritual of buying a cup of coffee from their local coffee shop. They may be unaware of where their coffee comes from, the wages people earned to grow and process the beans, or the practices that were used […]

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Most coffee consumers don’t see past the barista and espresso machine as they partake in their daily ritual of buying a cup of coffee from their local coffee shop.

They may be unaware of where their coffee comes from, the wages people earned to grow and process the beans, or the practices that were used to cultivate the coffee plants that house those beans. They may not know that the market processes that bring them their morning brews may be unethical, exploitative, or environmentally harmful.

Peter Roberts, professor of Organization & Management and the academic director of Specialty Coffee Programs for Goizueta’s Business & Society Institute, is working to educate students on every aspect of the coffee industry so they can be more mindful about how they participate in coffee commerce.

Over spring break this March, Roberts traveled with a cohort of undergraduate BBA, graduate One-Year and Two-Year MBA students, and a Goizueta alumna to learn about specialty coffee growing communities in Guatemala. This marked the trip’s rebirth after a three-year hiatus.

According to De La Gente, the farmer-facing organization Roberts partnered with to host the group, there are approximately 125,000 coffee farmers in Guatemala, 97 percent of which are small-scale producers that make up almost 45 percent of the country’s total coffee production. The organization shares Roberts’ goal to cultivate a more inclusive and equitable coffee industry.

“If I’m dropping $4 on a cup of coffee or maybe $7 on pour over coffee, how can we get coffee producers paid more than, like, $3 for a pound of green beans?” Roberts asks.

We want these producers to not only grow better coffee from a quality perspective, but also to grow it in a climate-smart way and pay their workers living wages.

“However, there is a movement to reward producers for growing high quality, shade-grown coffee following regenerative practices,” Roberts says.

He notes how this movement recognizes that the right kinds of coffee farms, situated around the world, can become carbon sinks rather than carbon emitters.

The group traveled with Roberts’ industry colleague Chad Trewick, who helped educate the group on the climate implications of coffee production. Conventional coffee has high carbon emissions, caused mainly by deforestation and the use of chemicals.

Participants on the trip were walked through the value chain of coffee production.

The group spent six days in and around the “culturally vibrant” city of Antigua, where they toured coffee farms, spoke to farmers about their challenges, heard from a panel of local coffee professionals, and walked through the processes of planting, harvesting, processing, and exporting coffee in ways that are good for both people and the planet.

They experienced Antigua’s exploding third wave coffee scene where coffee growers are emphasizing high quality.

“A number of decades ago, people who grew coffee had never even tried their own coffees because they were locked in an exploitative culture of exporting coffee and not consuming it,” Roberts said.

Now, more Guatemalans are participating and actually drinking excellent coffees. With these developments, two things happen: producers make better money selling coffee internally than they do on global markets, and local consumers provide more and better market feedback.

Roberts notes how it is easy to leave ideas in the back of your mind when you pick them up in a classroom. When students engage with people and processes first-hand, they resonate more.

He says students become more appreciative of coffee and more cognizant of where the coffee they drink comes from.

“Seeing firsthand all the incredibly hard work that goes into coffee production was an eye-opening and humbling experience,” Eike Hoffmann 24MBA said. “While the complexity of improving the livelihoods of farmers and protecting the environment is overwhelming, I came away from the trip feeling empowered as a consumer who can ensure that my morning brew is responsibly sourced.”

In the future, Roberts says he’d like to plan two trips per year. One will focus on coffee and its climate implications. The other will be tied to the Grounds for Empowerment program—an Emory-based initiative that works with women specialty coffee producers to help them tell farm stories that lead to better market relationships and better green coffee prices.

“After all, coffee farmers produce more than just great beans,” Robert says. “They also produce the stories that go behind the coffees we love.”

Want to learn more about the $102 billion global coffee industry and who reaps the financial rewards? Professor Peter Roberts explains it all in “What Goes into Your Cup of Coffee?” on the Goizueta Effect podcast.

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2021 in Ten Great Stories (You Might Have Missed) https://www.emorybusiness.com/2022/01/07/2021-in-ten-great-stories-you-might-have-missed/ Fri, 07 Jan 2022 14:45:00 +0000 https://www.emorybusiness.com/?p=23944 With 2021 now in our rearview mirrors, EmoryBusiness takes a look back at milestone moments, faculty research, Goizueta student accomplishments and success stories, and the people and programs that made this past year so memorable. Enjoy these ten great stories that you might have missed. Goizueta Entrepreneurs-in-Residence Provide Insight into Entrepreneurship, Early-Stage Investing, and Innovation […]

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With 2021 now in our rearview mirrors, EmoryBusiness takes a look back at milestone moments, faculty research, Goizueta student accomplishments and success stories, and the people and programs that made this past year so memorable.

Enjoy these ten great stories that you might have missed.

Goizueta Entrepreneurs-in-Residence Provide Insight into Entrepreneurship, Early-Stage Investing, and Innovation

Amelia Schaffner, director of entrepreneurship
Amelia Schaffner, director of The Roberto C. Goizueta Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Goizueta’s 2021-23 Entrepreneurs in Residence (EiR) cohort are poised to help students translate vision into impact. The EiR program is housed within The Roberto C. Goizueta Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation, launched in 2021 to foster entrepreneurship and innovation by offering vital support in three areas: entrepreneurship, early-stage investing, and innovation.

The EiR program plays a vital role in the Center’s efforts to support entrepreneurship, early-stage investing, and innovation. Since the creation of the program in 2017, Goizueta has selected EiRs whose backgrounds and experiences align with these priorities. Read the complete article here.

A woman smells fresh coffee.

From Bean to Cup: Goizueta Balances the Scale of Financial Equity for Female Coffee Farmers

The Roberto C. Goizueta Business & Society Institute’s Grounds for Empowerment (GFE) program seeks to balance the scales in one historically imbalanced industry: coffee. “From a business school perspective, coffee represents a very important problem,” said Giselle Barrera 15MBA, GFE’s program manager for Latin America. “It’s a multibillion-dollar market where you’re not looking for consumers. You don’t find coffee; coffee finds you. And yet, if you look at the value chain, the revenue is not distributed equally.” Read the complete article here.

Full-Time MBA Ranks 18th in Nation by Businessweek 

Goizueta Business School

In the recently released Bloomberg Businessweek 2021-22 Best B-schools MBA ranking, the Full-Time, Two-Year MBA at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School is ranked 18th in the nation. The ranking evaluates Full-Time MBA programs on five key categories including compensation, networking, learning, entrepreneurship, and diversity. The diversity category is a new measure added in this year’s methodology and measures MBA programs based on race, ethnicity, and gender in their classes. Read the complete article.

Erin Lightfoot

Erin Lightfoot 21MBA On the Forefront of Vaccinating Georgians

Social Enterprise Fellow Erin Lightfoot 21MBA has served as a mass vaccination site operations manager at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in downtown Atlanta. The largest mass vaccination site in the southeast, Mercedes-Benz crossed the 250,000-vaccination milestone on April 30th. “It’s been a huge, orchestra-like production,” Lightfoot explained. “Multiple teams have come together to bring this whole initiative to life.” Read the complete article here.

Corporate Social Responsibility Builds Investor Trust

Assistant Professor of Accounting Suhas A. Sridharan
Assistant Professor of Accounting Suhas A. Sridharan

Goizueta faculty research delves deep into critical issues for business leaders around the world. In her latest research, Assistant Professor of Accounting Suhas A. Sridharan notes, “Earnings announcements are among the most salient and recurring areas of corporate disclosure, and managers and investors pay very close attention to them.”  She goes on to say, “We know that these types of announcements are lengthy and dense; they take time to process. So, the intuition here is that when your firm plants a flag on responsibility and accountability, investors are more likely to take your disclosures at face value – they’re more likely to trust what you’re saying.” Read the complete article.

Thillen and Duke
Sandy Duke 21MBA with Thillen Education Foundation Founder Dave Thillen and Greene College and Career Academy CEO John Ellenberg.

Goizueta MBA Students Deliver Impact to Mentoring Program for Rural Georgia Teens

The Goizueta IMPACT program puts theory into practice to build career readiness. In the process, all MBA students are offered the opportunity to affect countless lives by sharing forward-looking expertise and feedback with community organizations, corporations, and nonprofits. To date, this unique MBA experiential learning program has provided action plans for local, national, and international organizations.

About 75 miles east of Goizueta Business School, Dave Thillen began realizing in 2020 that his deeply rooted, effective, volunteer mentoring program could benefit from professional consulting. For decades he had loved the frontline work of supporting hundreds of rural teenagers to set individualized life goals and begin to achieve them. Read the complete article here.

New SPAC IPOs Inspire Happy Investors to Sign Blank Checks

Klaas Baks
Klaas Baks, professor in the practice of finance at Goizueta and executive director, Center for Alternative Investments.

The current SPAC frenzy has led to predictions that the SPAC market is a bubble ready to burst, but Klaas Baks, professor in the practice of finance and executive director, Emory Center for Alternative Investments, doesn’t see it that way. He points to financial practices such as leveraged buyouts and securitization, both considered suspect in their heyday, but that are mainstream today. “We’re in the first inning of SPACs,” said Baks. Read the complete article here.

A Million-Dollar Student-Run Venture Capital Fund Focused on Empowering Underrepresented Founders

Peachtree Minority Venture Fund (PMVF)

Venture capital shaped Miguel Vergara 22MBA’s path to Goizueta Business School’s full-time MBA program, where he is eager to participate in a new venture fund run by himself and other students. These students are carrying on the legacy of recent MBA graduates who sought to take action against systemic racial inequalities in business. The result is the Peachtree Minority Venture Fund of The Roberto C. Goizueta Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation, the first student-run fund in the United States focused on empowering underrepresented founders. Read the complete article here.

Goizueta Faculty Recognized with Awards for Excellence, Dedication over Past Year

Each year, Goizueta Business School honors faculty members for their dedication to and leadership in academic excellence in teaching, content development, experiential learning, scholarly inquisition, and commitment. We are proud to present this year’s 14 recipients.

Assistant Professor in the Practice of Accounting Allison Kays

Several Goizueta faculty were recently recognized by Emory University for their accomplishments over the past year, including Assistant Professor in the Practice of Accounting Allison Kays and Associate Professor in the Practice of Marketing Omar Rodríguez-Vilá. Read the complete article here.

Mercedes-Benz USA Gains Goizueta Student Gen Z Insight in Business Communication Strategy Case Competition

Each year, BBA students at Goizueta participate in the “BComm” course designed to strengthen their communications techniques and introduce them to the skills required to prepare for and deliver client presentations.

The defining moment of the BBA program’s Business Communication Strategy or “BComm” course is the end-of-semester Professional Communications Strategy Case Competition. This past spring, executives from Mercedes-Benz USA (MBUSA) asked three-dozen BComm student teams how they would introduce Mercedes-EQA, the automaker’s new, all-electric crossover SUV, to Gen Z consumers (those born between 1995 and 2010). Read the complete article here.

Goizueta Celebrates 2021 Undergraduate and MBA Business Grads for Record-Breaking Employment Rates, Top Salaries

goizueta-impact

With principled leadership in the forefront, Goizueta is proud to report that 97 percent of 2021 BBA graduates received, and 96 percent accepted employment offers within three months of graduating. Read the complete article here. Touting the best employment rates in the school’s history, Goizueta full-time MBA graduates entered the job market in full force. Within three months of graduating, 99 percent of students received and accepted offers for a full-time job. Furthermore, at graduation, 91 percent of the class received a full-time offer, representing an 8 percent increase over the previous year. Read the complete article here.

Check out our homepage at EmoryBusiness.com for new stories highlighting faculty, alumni, and student insight into the research, trends, and current events impacting business today.

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From Bean to Cup: Goizueta Balances the Scale of Financial Equity for Female Coffee Farmers https://www.emorybusiness.com/2021/06/04/from-bean-to-cup-goizueta-balances-the-scale-of-financial-equity-for-female-coffee-farmers/ Fri, 04 Jun 2021 18:08:30 +0000 https://www.emorybusiness.com/?p=22662 Terms like “diversity and inclusion,” “equity,” and “sustainability” seem to be repeated everywhere lately. They appear in mission statements, press releases, and HR memos in attempts to recognize and mitigate long-standing injustices in the workplace and the world’s economy. But there’s a difference between knowing the right words to use and taking action to make […]

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Terms like “diversity and inclusion,” “equity,” and “sustainability” seem to be repeated everywhere lately. They appear in mission statements, press releases, and HR memos in attempts to recognize and mitigate long-standing injustices in the workplace and the world’s economy. But there’s a difference between knowing the right words to use and taking action to make them a reality.

The Roberto C. Goizueta Business & Society Institute’s Grounds for Empowerment (GFE) program seeks to balance the scales in one historically imbalanced industry: coffee. “From a business school perspective, coffee represents a very important problem,” said Giselle Barrera 15MBA, GFE’s program manager for Latin America. “It’s a multibillion-dollar market where you’re not looking for consumers. You don’t find coffee; coffee finds you. And yet, if you look at the value chain, the revenue is not distributed equally.” 

According to Fairtrade International, coffee farmers make less than a dollar per pound for their products. Meanwhile, a pound of Starbucks’ Pike Place Roast sells for $12. Many factors contribute to the markup between bean and bag, but coffee represents a particularly imbalanced market. According to industry expert Peter Roberts, professor of Organization & Management and academic director of specialty coffee programs at the Institute, “Way too many people get not nearly enough. And it has nothing to do with what they’re bringing to the table; it has everything to do with how the table’s been set. As a program, GFE is unabashedly pro-market. We just want a market that’s better structured.”

“Way too many people get not nearly enough, and it has nothing to do with what they’re bringing to the table; it has everything to do with how the table’s been set. As a program, GFE is unabashedly pro-market. We just want a market that’s better structured.”

Peter Roberts, professor of Organization & Management and academic director of specialty coffee programs at the Roberto C. Goizueta Business & Society Institute

Empowering Women to Build a Better Coffee Market 

Grounds for Empowerment connects women specialty coffee growers in Latin America with trained business school students and experienced industry mentors. This year, because the program was entirely remote, students participated not only from Goizueta, but from universities in Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Guatemala. 

Through a series of classes and workshops, the program uses the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide to empower women, some of whom are third- and fourth-generation coffee farmers, with information about real prices to analyze their coffee’s worth in the market. When the time comes to sell these coffees, “No one’s telling them what to expect; no one’s telling them what they deserve,” said Roberts. “Producers can come to the table fully owning their side of the transaction.”

“Owning their side of the transaction” does not merely mean fluency in Excel. According to Roberts, “Excellent coffee and amazing stories are the only two things sold in coffee shops.” So, after spending the first few weeks of the semester learning about the coffee production process, the global value chain, and the industry’s challenges and opportunities, students begin working with farmers as they learn to tell their stories.

Breanna Spurley 22MBA explained that in this phase of the program, her role with Dina—the first woman in four generations of coffee growers to manage the farm—was to reflect the uniqueness of Dina’s own narrative back to her. “There was so much emotion behind her story, but she thought all the things that she’d done to grow and maintain the family business were commonplace,” said Spurley. “They are not.”

After getting to know the farmers’ stories, participants shifted their focus to marketing and photography. “The photography piece was interesting, because I’d never thought about how important it was until I participated in Grounds for Empowerment,” explained Spurley. “One moment really stuck with me. Dina sent us some pictures, and one was just these big white flowers, blooming on the farm. I asked her, ‘Why did you pick this picture? What does it have to do with coffee?’ She said, ‘I’m the first woman in my family to manage this land, and I think it’s important that I add touches of femininity.’ And I thought, ‘OK, Breanna, time to listen.’”

“Listen and Collaborate” for True Transformation

The ability to listen and collaborate, rather than lecture, is vital to the program’s success. “When we first started working in coffee, we got almost everything wrong,” admitted Roberts. “There’s a strong temptation to come to the table as, ‘We are Emory University. You have problems; we have solutions.’ But our early efforts floundered because we approached things that way.”

Now, Grounds for Empowerment sees itself as “an exchange of learning,” as Barrera put it. “As someone who’s lived most of her life in Latin America, I know that the ‘development’ approach, where someone says, ‘read this pamphlet and you’ll understand and fix it,’ doesn’t work. Instead, we try to come up with collective solutions.”

This collaborative perspective yields transformative effects—not just economically, but relationally. “We build the program off of the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide which has valid and current pricing information, but one of the biggest things we do is to just introduce these women to one another,” said Roberts. “So, there’s a novel idea of how much your coffee is actually worth, combined with new networks to support their farm businesses. It’s a chance for people to see themselves and their business in a different economic light, and it very much dwarfs the importance of, ‘I have these specific business skills that I need to teach you.’”

“It speaks to the size of the problem, that we are assembling ourselves around a network of organizations and stakeholders and farmers and supporters, but also consumers who love the industry and want it to be more transparent and sustainable long-term. It’s not something that one program or one organization is going to be able to fix.” 

Giselle Barrera 15MBA, GFE’s program manager for Latin America

Changing the Narrative, Cup by Cup

Changing the coffee industry requires changing the narrative around the value of coffee itself. “It speaks to the size of the problem, that we are assembling ourselves around a network of organizations and stakeholders and farmers and supporters, but also consumers who love the industry and want it to be more transparent and sustainable long-term,” said Barrera. “It’s not something that one program or one organization is going to be able to fix.” 

But acknowledging the scope of the problem does not mean surrendering to its complexity. “Do I think some professor is going to come up with a PDF file with a bunch of prices in it and a workshop curriculum, and this is going to fix the entire coffee industry?” said Roberts. “Not even close. Now, do I think that this is the best thing that we can be doing right now to create the preconditions where the future could look better than the past? Absolutely.”

Grounds for Empowerment is one of the many social enterprise initiatives of The Roberto C. Goizueta Business & Society Institute. The new Institute is charged with addressing some of the biggest global issues facing business and society today.

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Goizueta Business School Launches The Roberto C. Goizueta Business & Society Institute https://www.emorybusiness.com/2021/03/05/goizueta-business-school-launches-the-roberto-c-goizueta-business-society-institute/ Fri, 05 Mar 2021 15:15:57 +0000 https://www.emorybusiness.com/?p=21844 The Institute reflects the school’s elevated commitment to social impact and seeks to transform business to solve society’s challenges On March 4, 2021, The Roberto C. Goizueta Business & Society Institute celebrated its official launch during a virtual celebration attended by nearly 300 guests. The Institute marks the next phase of the Goizueta Business School’s […]

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The Institute reflects the school’s elevated commitment to social impact and seeks to transform business to solve society’s challenges

Goizueta Business School Associate Professor and Academic Director Wes Longhofer
Goizueta Business School Associate Professor and Academic Director Wes Longhofer

On March 4, 2021, The Roberto C. Goizueta Business & Society Institute celebrated its official launch during a virtual celebration attended by nearly 300 guests. The Institute marks the next phase of the Goizueta Business School’s social impact initiatives.

To celebrate the launch of the Institute, Goizueta Business School Associate Professor and Academic Director Wes Longhofer led a fireside chat on “Reimagining Capitalism” with Harvard Business School professor and author, Dr. Rebecca Henderson. Published in 2020, Dr. Henderson’s book Reimagining Capitalism in A World on Fire articulates a framework for building a profitable, equitable, and sustainable capitalism grounded in new ways of defining the role of business in society.

An Institute Focused on Transforming Business to Solve Society’s Challenges

The Roberto C. Goizueta Business & Society Institute

The Institute’s goal is to transform business to solve society’s challenges through cutting-edge research, innovative programming, and principled leadership. The belief is that business and society can work collectively to address the challenges of inequality and climate change, two of the most pressing challenges facing both business and society today.

“If business and society are to work together to solve some of our biggest challenges, a good place to start is in a business school like Goizueta,” said Longhofer. “We are excited to continue ten years of social impact work at the Goizueta Business School and honor the legacy of Roberto C. Goizueta through this new institute.”

The Roberto C. Goizueta Business & Society Institute is made possible by an investment from The Goizueta Foundation and follows the success of Social Enterprise @ Goizueta, an academic research center that has been in existence at the school since 2009.

The Institute creates interdisciplinary study that explores the connections between business practices, market structures and social and environmental outcomes.

The call to action is to create stronger communities in Atlanta and globally by focusing on microbusiness development, specialty markets and next generation leadership.

Coursework and hands-on experiences including travel, mentorship, conferences, and consulting projects that will help students accelerate their business knowledge into impactful roles in the business community locally and abroad.

Experiential Programming Designed for Community Engagement

Programs in The Roberto C. Goizueta Business & Society Institute include:

  • Start:ME – Offers an intensive 14-week business accelerator program to the most promising micro-entrepreneurs in marginalized metro Atlanta communities, including business training, mentorship, and early-stage financing to develop their businesses.
  • Grounds for Empowerment – Provides female specialty coffee farmers in Latin America the market connections and business knowledge to grow their farms. The program has served 50 female coffee farmers in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala.
  • Social Enterprise Fellows – Provides Goizueta MBA and BBA students with hands-on education, exposure, and experiences to become the next social and environmental impact leaders in their industries.

New initiatives addressing strategic focus areas of inequality and climate change will be launched in the future.

Learn more about the Institute at emory.biz/society.

To continue the conversation on reimaging capitalism, the Institute is hosting a series of virtual, small group discussions focused on Climate Change and Economics & Equity throughout March and April. For more information on virtual discussions including schedule, hosts, and registration details, please visit emory.biz/civicdinners.

Watch recording of The Roberto C. Goizueta Business & Society Launch event below.

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Take a virtual trip to Nicaragua with Grounds for Empowerment https://www.emorybusiness.com/2019/02/21/take-a-virtual-trip-to-nicaragua-with-grounds-for-empowerment/ Thu, 21 Feb 2019 18:10:09 +0000 https://www.emorybusiness.com/?p=17405 Each year, Grounds for Empowerment, a specialty coffee program powered by Social Enterprise @ Goizueta, visits coffee country in Nicaragua with a group of interested travelers. Watch the video and follow along as the GFE team takes you through origin in Nicaragua!

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Filmmakers Ben and Isaac Roberts interview specialty coffee farmer Alexa Marin at her farm Finca San Antonio in Nicaragua

Each year, Grounds for Empowerment, a specialty coffee program powered by Social Enterprise @ Goizueta, visits coffee country in Nicaragua with a group of interested travelers. Due to the current political situation in Nicaragua, traveling with a large group this year was not possible. Despite this, the GFE team traveled down to capture a Virtual Origin Trip on camera and bring the experience to you!

GFE kept with tradition by visiting the women coffee farmers it works with, a coffee cooperative, and its roasting partner, Vega’s, facilities in Estelí.

Watch the video and follow along as the GFE team takes you through origin in Nicaragua!

The detailed itinerary below gives virtual travelers context around each day of the trip.

  • Day 2: Our next stop was GFE farmer Ivania Calderon’s farm, Finca Alborada, which is nestled in the mountains near the town of Wiwili de Jinotega, Nicaragua. Ivania is a vocal advocate for women in coffee and continues to amplify the stories of generations of women who work hard to maintain quality and integrity in their product. Read more.
  • Day 3: After coffees are picked and harvested, they are often taken to a cooperative. PRODECOOP, a coffee cooperative in Estelí, Nicaragua, supports 2,300 smallholder coffee farmers in northern Nicaragua, 27% of whom are women, including GFE farmer Alexa MarinRead more.
  • Day 4: GFE farmer Alexa, a third generation coffee farmer, inherited both the farm and the passion for coffee production from her mother. Alexa is passionate and articulate about what motivates her to be a coffee farmer who challenges the norms and demonstrates that women can use coffee as a way to support their futures and their families. Read more.
  • Day 5: The final stop on the GFE Virtual Origin Trip allows us to see the final stop that our coffees make before they leave Nicaragua on the way to your home – Vega Coffee’s roasting facilities in Esteli, Nicaragua. Read more.

Learn more about Grounds for Empowerment at www.groundsforempowerment.org.

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Goizueta’s Grounds for Empowerment partners with Nicaragua’s Vega Coffee https://www.emorybusiness.com/2017/11/14/goizuetas-grounds-for-empowerment-partners-with-nicaraguas-vega-coffee/ Tue, 14 Nov 2017 19:06:26 +0000 https://www.emorybusiness.com/?p=13899 Grounds for Empowerment -- a Social Enterprise @ Goizueta initiative -- is partnering with Nicaragua’s Vega Coffee to provide even more economic opportunities for women coffee specialty coffee farmers.

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Grounds for Empowerment — a Social Enterprise @ Goizueta initiative — is partnering with Nicaragua’s Vega Coffee to provide even more economic opportunities for women coffee specialty coffee farmers. GFE coffee will be grown, roasted and shipped from Nicaragua, allowing participating farmers even greater participation in specialty coffee value chains.

The GFE program was created by Social Enterprise @ Goizueta (a research center within the Goizueta Business School at Emory University) to support female coffee farmers, initially in Nicaragua. The goal of this three-year business incubator program is to address the challenges associated with extreme isolation so that coffee market will fairly compensate women farmers.

This will allow them to invest in their businesses, families and communities, strengthening the areas where they live and work.

Vega Coffee is a roasting company in Esteli, Nicaragua. Founded by Rob Terenzi, Noushin Ketabi and William DeLuca, its goal is to create a more equitable and fulfilling coffee experience, connecting the world’s coffee farmers directly with the world’s coffee lovers. In the process, they have become field experts who are redefining the specialty coffee industry. 

Why? The global coffee industry is the primary means of support for millions of people around the world. However, too little of the $100 billion generated each year makes it back to origin.

  • Twenty-five million coffee farmers live and work in difficult conditions and are under-compensated for their hard work.
  • On coffee farms, women are overrepresented in most roles, but underrepresented when it comes to farm ownership and coffee sales. They make less money and have fewer opportunities than their male counterparts.
  • As the specialty coffee segment continues to grow, the price premiums that customers are paying for excellent coffees are attractive to farmers, as long as they are given the opportunity to capture a greater share of these payments.

How Grounds for Empowerment Works

Using an innovative three-year incubator model, GFE helps promising specialty coffee farmers develop valuable business knowledge and networks that will turn their promising coffee farms into successful small businesses. As the program expands into new coffee-growing countries, participating and alumni farmers will become part of the solution to chronic under-compensation in coffee communities around the world.

In this partnership with Vega, GFE farmers are now able to roast, package and ship their own coffees to customers around the United States — within five days of roasting.

  • By taking on more of the supply chain, Vega farmer roasters earn four times more income and learn skills that will pay dividends throughout their careers
  • Vega customers are part of a transparent supply chain that delivers the finest ‘farmer roasted’ coffees from Nicaragua to their door within five days of roasting, fresh and ready to enjoy

“Women have worked for coffee for years and it is time for coffee to work for women,” Peter Roberts, academic director of Social Enterprise @ Goizueta said. “This new partnership with Vega allows our work to move one step closer to the final coffee consumer, giving our farmers an even deeper perspective on what it takes to compete in specialty coffee markets.”

“We’re thrilled to work together with Grounds for Empowerment to move the coffee industry forward, by equipping their farmer partners with the tools and training to roast and package their coffee,” said Noushin Ketabi, co-founder of Vega Coffee said. “Our joint focus on women farmers ensures that more economic prosperity flows back into projects that support children, families and communities.”

 

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Nicaragua farmers highlight second annual GFE Community Forum https://www.emorybusiness.com/2017/10/31/nicaragua-farmers-highlight-second-annual-gfe-community-forum/ Tue, 31 Oct 2017 12:00:44 +0000 https://www.emorybusiness.com/?p=13653 At this year’s second annual Grounds for Empowerment Community Forum attendees had the opportunity to experience something unique. Four GFE farmers, Ivania Calderón, Alexa Marin, Ramona Diaz and Sara Corrales, are all from Nicaragua and were able to attend this year’s forum to share, experience, network and learn. Powered by Social Enterprise @ Goizueta, GFE […]

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At this year’s second annual Grounds for Empowerment Community Forum attendees had the opportunity to experience something unique.

Four GFE farmers, Ivania Calderón, Alexa Marin, Ramona Diaz and Sara Corrales, are all from Nicaragua and were able to attend this year’s forum to share, experience, network and learn.

Powered by Social Enterprise @ Goizueta, GFE provides specialty coffee farmers the market connections and business know-how to help them reach full economic potential. The three-year program supports women as they transform their coffee farms into prosperous small businesses.

The week included learning modules, coffee business visits, a Monthly Grind event at Goizueta, a public cupping to experience the farmers’ coffees at Counter Culture Coffee and various working sessions. The week was capped off by a GFE Farm Dinner at Gaia Gardens to celebrate the week’s activities.

Academic Director of Social Enterprise @ Goizueta and Professor of Organization and Management Peter Roberts addressed the gathering at the public coffee cupping and explained the importance of GFE.

“In a nutshell, we firmly believe that there is some amazing economic potential that’s scattered around small coffee producers around Latin America, and we think it’s the job of folks like us to turn amazing farms into promising small businesses,” Roberts said. “What we’re trying to do is identify amazing women who grow coffee and try to close that gap so that people have a better appreciation for how small producers moving forward can do a better job accessing the market and getting better terms for their coffee.”

View the gallery: 

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Goizueta gives boost to women coffee growers https://www.emorybusiness.com/2016/12/01/goizueta-gives-boost-to-women-coffee-growers/ Thu, 01 Dec 2016 13:27:12 +0000 http://www.emorybusiness.com/?p=11365 When you brew your morning coffee, chances are those beans passed through the hands of a number of women before they reached your cup. Unfortunately, while women do a lot of the work in growing and harvesting specialty coffee, they are underrepresented further up the supply chain, where prices are negotiated and money changes hands. […]

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When you brew your morning coffee, chances are those beans passed through the hands of a number of women before they reached your cup. Unfortunately, while women do a lot of the work in growing and harvesting specialty coffee, they are underrepresented further up the supply chain, where prices are negotiated and money changes hands.

The good news? Social Enterprise @ Goizueta (SE@G) is taking steps to empower the best of these women growers. This year, SE@G’s Farmers to 40 program—which ensures equitable compensation for coffee growers by returning 40 percent of all sales to coffee growers in Nicaragua—is moving in a new direction.

This fall, SE@G launched a new incubator program called Grounds for Empowerment (GFE), which identifies promising women growers and provides them with the business know-how, marketplace connections, and investment funds to reach their full economic potential. GFE’s first two growers visited Atlanta this November.

“This first visit to Atlanta by Ivania Calderon and Ramona del Socorro was important for all of us as we build the networks and knowledge that will allow these and other promising women to become economic leaders in their communities,” says Peter Roberts, professor of organization & management and academic director of SE@G.—BW

To buy excellent coffee that empowers women growers, place your orders online at http://groundsforempowerment.org.

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