Moka Joe Coffee

Coffee for a Cause

 

Coffee adds a lot to a community, but where Trudy Scherting, owner of Moka Joe Coffee in Bellingham, Washington, is concerned, there’s more than meets the eye. Scherting is a coffee roaster committed to using her business for the good of the coffee-growing communities from Sumatra to Brazil, as well as her local community. Moka Joe’s logo uses a strong man to symbolize the “Indiana Jones” of the coffee world who’s searching equatorial countries worldwide for the world’s best coffee beans. But in reality, the adventurer behind the company is Scherting, a woman with social commitment.

Scherting was one of the first members of B Corporation. In May she was invited to speak as part of a panel with other B Corporation members at the Washington Lawyers for Sustainability Continuing Legal Education conference: “Sustainability’s Core: What Must Lawyers Do?” at Seattle University. The conference was an opportunity for lawyers to explore the role they can perform in economical, ecological and social sustainability.

For Scherting, being a B Corporation member supports her values as a business committed to the people growing the coffee organically and sustainably. She explained B Corporation’s guidelines for companies to be considered a green company, and talked about the ways in which her B Corporation membership validates Moka Joe’s Coffee as a green, sustainable company, separating her company from companies who are “greenwashing.”

            In May, Scherting took her coffee business another green step forward when she opened a café in the front of the Moka Joe Roastery. Scherting and her husband, Joe Scherting, took the local Sustainable Connections’ Fresh & Local Pledge, which means they promise to use sustainable business practices. These include pledges to Zero Waste and the Whatcom Watershed Business as well as using Green Power. They also encourage Smart Trips by furnishing a bike rack and the cafe is one of only ten Bellingham businesses that joined the national movement of Tapitwater.com to refill water bottles, thereby avoiding the waste of plastic bottles and paper cups.

In addition to adhering to her values by opening a green café, the baristas will be serving Bellingham’s freshest cup of coffee—the coffee beans will come out of the roaster in the back room and served as coffee specialties in the front café. Customers can satisfy their curiosity about the roasting process by watching the roaster through a window in the café.

 

When Scherting started her business in her garage, in 2001, she was a Fair Trade pioneer, one of only six coffee roasters in the U.S. who used Fair Trade Certified™ coffee beans. The certification is important because it means the beans are monitored throughout the growing process for environmental, sustainable practices and the workers’ treatment is audited. Buyers also pay an extra ten cents a pound, which goes back to the communities for development, health care, education and programs for domestic abuse, among others.

Taking a look at the Moka Joe coffee beans bags, one of the bags stands out because it profiles a young mother with her baby rather than its usual logo of a strong man. This coffee supports another of Scherting’s causes.  The coffee beans are from Café Femenino, a remarkable women’s coffee cooperative that started in Peru. It is a single-origin coffee raised by women growers to help them fight poverty and abuse. The women get an extra two cents a pound for their pink-laced burlap bag of coffee beans.

A new documentary, Strong Coffee: The Story of Café Femenino, features Scherting on a 2006 trip she took to Peru with five other coffee roasters to highlight the importance of women in coffee growing. The film shows how foreign consumer dollars can improve the lives of the local growers. On the film’s website, www.strongcoffeefilm.com, Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus is quoted saying,  "[W]hen it (money) is managed by a woman, the money is better utilized to benefit the family than if it [is] managed by a man.” The Café Femenino Foundation has been an exemplary example of the truth of his observation.

Scherting donates 2 percent of the gross profits from Café Femenino back to the women in her own Bellingham community, specifically to Dorothy Place, a program of the Opportunity Council that provides transitional housing for women and children who are survivors of domestic violence. The secure 21-unit facility offers support services and up to two years of housing for single women and women with children.

  The money that Scherting has sent quarterly since 2005 is used for client support services, such as children’s programs, paying a medical bill or helping a woman set up her household. Community Service Director Debbie Paton explained that it is unusual for businesses to provide regular support. “We’ve really appreciated being able to give folks at Dorothy Place what they need so they can move on,” Paton said.

While Scherting was in Peru she observed the tough time women had getting clean water. She learned how she could help when she heard Leon McLaughlin, a Seattle shoeshine operator, interviewed on the radio. McLaughlin talked about an inexpensive water purification system he’d invented for use in developing countries. Scherting went to Seattle to speak with him.  He works in the Columbia Tower American Express building and he took her to the top floor to talk brainstorm with key players about collaborating to create a specialty coffee to raise money for water filtration equipment, which resulted in a Coffee for Clean Water. Proceeds from the sale of this coffee will go to purchase filtration systems.

Like most business owners, Scherting gets regular requests to donate, and last year she donated to over 27 different causes. But for Project Homeless Connect, she took her commitment a step further and brewed over 1,000 cups of coffee for guests and volunteers.

One cup of coffee at a time, Scherting is changing both the global communities her business depends on, and her home community.

 

For additional information, visit www.mokajoe.com, Call (360) 714-1953 or fax (360) 714-8673 or email: mokajoe@comcast.net

Kate Nichols
Nichols PR Service
Bellingham, Washington
360/223-3252