Coffee for good causes – a round up of beneficial beans
Melanie May | 16 May 2023 | News
In time for your mid-morning break, here’s a round-up of UK-based coffee-related companies that generate funds for charities.
Change Please
With Change Please, 100% of profits go to ending homelessness, providing people experiencing homelessness with a living wage job, housing, training, and onwards opportunities. There are beans, ground coffee, merchandise and subscriptions on offer.
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Kingdom Coffee
Kingdom Coffee works with charities including Toybox, Tearfund and Latin Link to fund and support work to help to improve lives in coffee growing communities around the world. Locally it sponsors organisations including the Street Pastors, The Footsteps Foundation, an intensive physiotherapy for disabled children, CIRDIC and Providence, helping homeless and disadvantaged, and the Younger People With Dementia charity in Wokingham.
Social Bite
Social Bite works to end homelessness and its initiatives include its coffee shops. These employ staff who come from a homeless background, and offer a daily free food service powered by customers choosing to Pay it Forward in-store. There are branches in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and London.
Volcano Coffee Works
Volcano Coffee Works is supporting Crisis through its coffee. 15% of every sale of its Crisis Coffee Blend goes directly to the charity to help people out of homelessness.
Leaps & Grounds
British Red Cross’s Leaps & Grounds is a social enterprise that sells speciality coffee and through this, supports women who have experienced forced displacement into work. All the money from the Leaps & Grounds with Caravan Coffee Roasters coffee goes into funding a programme that trains, mentors and employs women who have experienced forced displacement to support them in building their dream careers.
Grind
Grind launched the Better Coffee Foundation in February to begin reversing some of the damage caused by the wider coffee industry. Through donations from Grind, the Better Coffee Foundation has pledged to remove two coffee pods’ worth of plastic from the ocean for every Grind pod sold. This includes a partnership with CleanHub to collect plastic waste before it can enter the oceans, and funding the recovery of plastic in communities in Kerala, South West India.
Soho Coffee Company
The Soho Coffee Company offers a single origin Guatemala coffee, in support of Young Minds UK. £1 from every bag goes to support the charity’s work in getting young people the mental health support they need.
The Bean Shop
The Bean Shop is supporting Scotland’s Air Ambulance Charity through its SCAA Blend, with 50p from each 250g coffee sold being donated directly to the charity.
Kids Club Kampala
Kids Club Kampala offers Uganda African Moon, from Dancing Road Coffee. Every penny spent on it goes towards helping vulnerable children and families in Kampala’s slum communities.
Chimney Fire Coffee
Chimney Fire Coffee is a certified B Corp, and donates 25p from every 250g bag and £1 from every 1kg bag of all Discovery Coffee sales to Re-Cycle, a small charity recycling bikes from the UK and shipping them to rural communities in Africa. For every 28 kilos of coffee roasted, a single bike plus spare parts will be sent to Africa.
200° Coffee
200° Coffee’s Switch Up Charity Coffee supports Switch Up, a charity that works to empower young people to break the cycle of crime and gang-criminality. The speciality grade coffee showcases the work of women farmers across Guatemala in support of gender equality, with £1 donated to Switch Up for every kilo sold.
Safi Coffee
Profits from Safi Coffee pay for children to attend school in Uganda. The coffee is grown around school sites. Children have designed the packaging, painted the logo and manage the accounts, learning key business skills.
Contact Coffee Co
Contact Coffee Co, the ‘Original British Military Coffee Company, supports SSAFA, the Armed Forces charity. Its OP WELFARE is a charity coffee blend in which £2.50 from each sale is donated to the charity, with the aim of raising £5000.
Howden Coffee
When people buy directly from Howden Coffee, 5% of the order value goes to its partner charities. Shoppers can choose which charity they want their order to support at checkout. It most recently partnered with Kidney Cancer UK, with other partners including Emmaus UK, and Dove House Hospice.
Redemption Roasters
All Redemption Roasters speciality coffee is roasted inside its prison roastery at HMP The Mount. It runs a training programme for prison residents and people at risk of crime to give them the skills they need to get secure and meaningful employment.
Extract Coffee Roasters
Since 2007 Extract Coffee Roasters has donated more than £27,000 to charity projects through money raised from its coffees. Grounds Up is its charity collective – a collective of local and national charities supported year-round through volunteering, mentorship and fundraising. This includes work with Hotel School, Beyond Food, Empire Fighting Chance, The Long Table, and So Let’s Talk. It also supports good causes through its campaigning coffees.
Old Spike
Old Spike, Change Please’s sister company, is a social enterprise speciality roastery with the primary mission of helping reduce homelessness in the UK through training and employment within speciality coffee. 65% of the profits it generates go to support this mission. It also plants a tree for every bag of coffee sold through its partnership with the Eden Reforestation Project.
About Melanie May
Melanie May is a journalist and copywriter specialising in writing both for and about the charity and marketing services sectors since 2001. She can be reached via thepurplepim.com.