What does your coffee say about you? More than just identifying whether you take it black, with cream and sugar, or as an iced latte with whipped cream; does your coffee define your mission in life?
You may already use coffee that is fair trade, ethically sourced, organic, and Rainforest Alliance certified to show you support decent wages and the environment. Now, there’s a coffee club that is actually building a maternity hospital in Sierra Leone that will aid mothers and their babies.
Awesome Coffee Club
The Awesome Coffee Club is committed to doing just that and 100 percent of the profits are being used to help fund the hospital.
With a subscription to the club, you can purchase whole bean or ground coffee in a partnership with Sucafina Specialty Coffee. The Fair Trade and Rainforest Alliance certified coffee is ethically sourced from farmers’ cooperatives in Columbia.
You can order any number of 12-ounce bags of coffee when you have a subscription in the club and it will arrive in about a month – future orders will take just days –, reported IndyStar. At this time, the coffee subscriptions are over 70 percent taken and 100 percent of the profits are being used .
“It tastes really good,” co-founder John Green said in the FAQs on the club’s website. “It mostly tastes like coffee, but somehow a little better than the coffee I used to drink.”
The coffee club was founded by Green and his brother Hank, from Indianapolis, Indiana, who are authors of best-selling books who share the YouTube channel vlogbrothers. According to IndyStar, the brothers made a commitment in 2019 to help to reduce infant and maternal mortality in Sierra Leone.
Why Sierra Leone?
The Green family has been supporting the work of Partners In Health (PIH), a social justice organization that helps to provide quality healthcare anywhere in the world where it is needed, for over 10 years. In fact, according to the organization, The Greens run a yearly fundraiser, Project for Awesome, that supports PIH.
The family has raised funds for projects all over the world including helping in Haiti, Peru, and Rwanda, according to a YouTube video John made for PIH. Now they are turning their attention to the West African country Sierra Leone.
Green was inspired to help raise funds for a new hospital in the Kono district after learning that the country has the highest maternal mortality rate in the world. In fact, according to the United Nations, one in 17 women run the risk of dying in childbirth in Sierra Leone. They die from causes that could be treated in a well-stocked hospital.
In Sierra Leone, Green said on the video, “Pregnancy continues to be a life-threatening condition.” But this will change if hospitals are available to the women who usually deliver at home or in small clinics that frequently don’t have electricity or clean water.
The partnership between the Awesome Coffee Club and PIH will help to fund and build a Maternal Center in Kono, one cup of coffee at a time.
