Since our beginnings as a small project, we’ve grown into a program that’s proving to help women coffee growers sustain themselves and their families. We’re marking that change with a new name.
In 2013, Sustainable Harvest Coffee Importers partnered with Bloomberg Philanthropies to develop a vocational training project for women in post-conflict countries, called the Relationship Coffee Institute (RCI). Its primary goal was to encourage economic independence through knowledge, information and market access. We created a non-governmental organization to implement RCI’s vision on the ground in Rwanda called Sustainable Harvest Rwanda.
Over time, we added a social enterprise – Question Coffee Café and Roastery- to showcase the high-quality, specialty coffee grown by the graduates of our training program and sell it locally to every major hotel, restaurant and national park in Rwanda. Revenues from Question Coffee were directly reinvested in our training program.
As we’ve grown, having separate names has proven confusing, especially since each arm of our organization contributes to one overarching goal: to build income opportunities for women coffee growers and their families by helping them transform into business professionals.
The Relationship Coffee Institute, Sustainable Harvest Rwanda and Question Coffee will henceforth be called Sustainable Growers. Through the consistent use of one name, we can communicate the breadth and depth of our program, and promote women coffee farmers as Sustainable Growers.