Not just selling coffee...CSR

For this task, I decided to investigate about Starbucks, and their Corporate Social Responsibility. For the last few years they have been focusing a lot in the coffee farmers, their farms and crops, and their communities.

They believe that building a better community and having a sustainable environment and crops, result in better relationships and better products.

They have encouraged their exporters, coffee farmers and cooperatives to become Fair Trade Certified, this way, ensuring that this product is well paid and that there are high social and environmental standards applied in the farm.

Also, they contribute to worthy causes in the communities where they do business, like addressing children’s literacy, poverty alleviation, and the environment, to name a few. They contribute with different resources to support young social entrepreneurs who are seeking to change their local communities. This empowers and creates a positive felling not only for the farmers but in the place they live in.

They spent over $1.5 million (in 2007) investing in coffee-growing communities. The funds were used to pay 50 projects located in 11 countries, benefiting more than 50,000 local farmers, their families and community residents. They also work with several alternative-financing organizations that make loans to coffee grower associations so they can wait and sell their crops for more favourable prices.

Starbucks also invests in programs designed to strengthen local economic and social development. They work in collaboration with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that have the experience and that are experts in working with farming communities, this way, they help these farmers & communities improve their capacity to consistently bring their highest quality products to the market. These efforts involve from introducing farmers to better farming practices, to environmental preservation, also, they give out scholarships and education programs.

For example, in the UK Starbucks linked up with the National Literary Trust to create the Reading Communities partnership, so that schools and libraries are joined together by through a love of reading, also they have created a partnership with CARE International UK (one of the world’s top three aid agencies, fighting poverty and injustice in over 70 countries and helping 65 million people each year to find resources out of poverty); they are raising funds to support water resources, education and learning and sustainable agriculture projects in two villages in Ethiopia.

This is kind of social responsibility also applies to designers. I think it is important to help out in the place we live in. Creating pro bono work that will help and strengthen our communities and getting involved in making them better places, and creating awareness to social issues by integrating them with designs.