Partnerships Turn Local into Global

iDE is fortunate to be headquartered in Denver, Colorado for many reasons but one we appreciate nearly every morning is our proximity to great coffee. Queen City Collective Coffee has one of its three locations just down the block from our offices and it’s one of our favorite places to hold meetings and drink amazing coffee.

We want to use important moments like Colorado Gives Day to highlight our partnership. Together, we’re increasing livelihood opportunities for coffee farmers around the world. Stop into a Queen City store to taste coffee grown by our Honduran farmer partners, and learn about the five members in our blockchain coffee bean project.

iDE is dedicated to ending poverty by powering small-scale entrepreneurs and building robust market ecosystems that are financially competitive, resilient to changing climates, and inclusive of marginalized people. We work with coffee farmers to help them grow higher quality coffee beans and connect to reliable, trustworthy buyers, including Queen City Collective Coffee.

Queen City Collective Coffee is a local roastery founded by the Byington brothers, who spent a decade before opening their business coordinating humanitarian programs, organizing research projects in rural Africa, and discovering the meaning of community from Zimbabwe to Rwanda. Queen City believes in honest relationships, from farmers to consumers.

Together, iDE and Queen City are creating a more equitable value chain that respects coffee farmers, enabling them to build a sustainable, profitable future for their farms and families.

In early 2019, iDE had the opportunity to pilot a project using blockchain, testing the theory that the technology would provide more transparency to the value chain and result in smallholder coffee farmers earning more profit for their beans. Blockchain technology allows us to trace coffee from collection to cup.  With this level of transparency, we know exactly who is doing the hard work of tending to the plants that become our morning coffee. 

Our focus was the volatile coffee market in Honduras where we had seen coffee prices plummet in recent years. We asked our friends at Queen City if they would partner with us in purchasing and roasting the beans our farmers harvested. Years later, we are not just continuing to work together, we’re solidifying our workflow, results, and dedication.

Using the blockchain technology we developed with Bext360, farmers can virtually watch as their coffee beans make a winding journey to Queen City in Colorado to be roasted and enjoyed.

Farmers like Claudia Hernandez have now increased their income through the partnerships enabled by blockchain technology. However, when speaking with Claudia, we discovered that isn’t her focus. Instead, she shared the pride she feels knowing her name is attached to the delicious coffee being sipped thousands of miles away. 

We don’t work with local partners like Queen City in powering entrepreneurs to end poverty because it’s convenient. We do it because we value organizations that consider themselves members of a global community. We, alongside our partners, want to use this Colorado Gives Day as an opportunity to demonstrate that local partnerships can have global impact. 

We believe that entrepreneurs are everywhere and they are capable of almost anything. Supporters like you help us connect with more of these entrepreneurs who act as pebbles thrown in the pond of their community, creating ripples of long-term sustainability.