Buy coffee, help a village

The hot brewed java at Land of 1,000 Hills coffee shop in Roswell is more than just a great cup of joe.

It is jobs and bicycles, micro-loans and a soccer field in Bukonya, a tiny Rwandan village ravaged by the 1994 genocide.

It also provides a living for 32 people in Atlanta.

Owner Jonathan Golden started the business three years ago buying 20 bags —- 2,640 pounds —- of Bukonyan coffee. He is a business consultant and part-time Anglican priest in Ros-well. When he asked a Rwandan bishop friend what Americans can do to help, the bishop recommended getting Rwandan coffee-growing back on track.

Golden got a $20,000 line of credit, bought a used coffee roaster off eBay, and planned to sell the fresh product to churches.

“I said that this thing was going to work, or my family and friends were going to have coffee for presents for the next 20 years,” he said.

It worked. Golden has two shops in metro Atlanta, sells to 300 churches and restaurants and on the Web. The company roasts between 1,000 and 2,000 pounds of high-quality beans a week.

The shops are filled with photos of Rwandans picking coffee, drying beans, dancing in celebration and smiling broadly. He buys directly from them, paying $1.60 a pound, more than double what they had gotten before.

It is a for-profit business, but the idea is to do good and demonstrate healthy capitalism to the farmers, Golden said.

“The growers get a living wage. And you get a great cup of coffee,” he said.

Part of the company profits go back into microloans in Rwanda. Those are minimal loans of $50 to several hundred dollars to do things such as helping a vendor buy tomatoes to starting a vegetable stall or to buy a bicycle to help a farmer get coffee beans to market while still fresh, which increases the quality and price.

Golden makes sure those who come in know the story behind the business.

Jill Kallan of Roswell, leaving the shop with kids and her visiting mother in tow, said, “It’s such a feel-good place.”

Kallan said, “The music and the people and the coffee are great, and you feel like you are doing something for others.”

Golden’s business is known as philanthrocapitalism, a concept that is getting a lot of attention in the world of nonprofits. People from Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, to former President Bill Clinton are talking about its usefulness coupled with traditional philanthropy to help people out of poverty or social problems.

“The idea is that philanthrocapitalism can find ways to address social issues in ways traditional nonprofits or government agencies can’t,” said Dennis Young, director of nonprofit studies at Georgia State University. The school offers a class in social enterprise —- when nonprofits make money through the sale of services or products but plow the money back into the nonprofit’s mission.

Philanthrocapitalism has flexibility and strengths that traditional charities do not and is a useful tool to help people, he said.

For Golden, a start selling coffee to churches was a way to integrate work, heart and faith.

“If you talk about justice in your house of worship, why not brew a cup of coffee that matches your message?” he said.

For more information, visit the Web site drinkcoffeedogood.com.