Small Farmers. Big Change.

“Leading a business with your ideals? You must be crazy.”

That’s what Angela Vendetti and her business partner, Jill Fink, heard when they started dreaming about opening Mugshots Café in Philadelphia. “When we were writing our business plan and trying to get Mugshots open, people told us we were crazy for putting our ideals before business sense,” Vendetti explained to John Steele in the Philadelphia Weekly‘s recent article on Mugshots.

Angela has heard this before. She heard it firsthand when we took her and six other Equal Exchange enthusiasts on a trip to Nicaragua to visit our coffee co-operative partner CECOCAFEN in 2005. Pedro Haslam, the former General Manager who has since been elected to the Nicaraguan Senate (but remains President of the Board of CECOCAFEN) let her know she was not alone. “We are a business with a social mission,” he told us in a meeting in Matagalpa. “Unlike traditional businesses we are not motivated by profit for profit sake, but our goal is to provide the highest quality coffee and the highest quality of relationships with our importer partners so as to provide the highest quality of life for our co-op members. People told us we were crazy when we started, but we’re very proud of our accomplishments.”

Similarly, Pedro Rojas, General Manager of Tierra Nueva co-op in Nicaragua, has often told us how they were called “crazy” for wanting to grow organic coffee. In 1997, 23 farmers formed the Tierra Nueva coffee co-operative. “At that time, our neighbors were all watching us,” Rojas said. “We were terracing, using natural insecticides, and organic fertilizers. They said we had ‘gone crazy,’ that the coffee crisis (when world prices dropped below the costs of production) had made us crazy. Well, we didn’t care. In 2000, we obtained our organic and Fair Trade certifications. By 2004, we had grown to 600 crazy people.” The decision to switch to organic farming changed their lives. “When we started growing organically, we did it to get a better price,” Rojas said. “But organic sustainable agriculture has now become a way of life. It sets us apart from other farmers. Our soil is more fertile, our water cleaner, our forests are protected. Families are living better. The more benefits we see, the more enthusiastic we’ve become. We’re excited to keep experimenting with new ways to farm. Who are the crazy ones today?”

We’re used to skeptics. In 1986, when Rink Dickinson, Jonathan Rosenthal and Michael Rozyne started Equal Exchange with the aim to create a trade model that values the farmers, consumers and the earth, they too were ridiculed. But they took a big risk and plunged full-force into changing a broken food system. They started with fairly traded coffee from Nicaragua and didn’t look back.

As our model has proven, and our partners – both in the North and the South – have repeatedly shown, a business can lead with its ideals and social mission, offer a high quality product, engage others in its work, and still be economically and environmentally sustainable. Leading with ideals and producing a high quality product are not mutually exclusive.

Go ahead, call us crazy.

Read the full “Daily Grind” story here.

Phyllis Robinson contributed to this article.