Help Us Build a Storage Facility for Our Rising Forests Coffee!
Our Tree Bank / Hispaniola program works along a section of the Dominican Republic – Haiti border to restore native forest and help local farmers improve their incomes.
Last year, we created our own brand of coffee, Rising Forests, so that our farmers could sell you their coffee. Rising Forests Coffee is grown exclusively by our Tree Bank farmers, so it gives them a chance to connect directly to American consumers. Rising Forests is grown only under native forest canopy, so it creates a powerful incentive for forest conservation and restoration.
Rising Forests also pays a premium to our farmers: we buy only our farmers’ best beans, and we guarantee them a price that is at least 10 percent higher than the current price for top-quality Dominican coffee.
And Rising Forests is intended solely for the benefit of our farmers and their lands: we put all the profits—every last penny—back into our Tree Bank project area. No profits from Rising Forests stay in the United States; all profits are returned to the farming community that grew the coffee.
Our big goal for 2012 is to improve the processing of our coffee. Most of our farmers are very poor and none of them have ever grown coffee for export before. We’re helping them learn some handling and drying procedures that will allow them to make the most of their beans.
As part of this effort, we need to build a little concrete-block storage facility—a “coffee warehouse.” We’ll build the warehouse in Los Cerezos, the settlement at the center of our Tree Bank project area. Once it’s constructed, we’ll have a secure place to store our farmers’ coffee. And we’ll be able to control and manage our inventory much more effectively than we currently can—since at present, the coffee is stored all over the countryside.
We need to raise about $7,500 to build our warehouse. We could really use your help!