Our commitment to sustainability also includes our work here at home—in our roasteries and training centers, with our retail partners, and with like-minded organizations with whom we work to serve common causes.
We hire awesome people who are aligned with our sustainability values. In order to support these employees, we allocate community supported agriculture (CSA) shares each summer. We also have a green fund, which provides up to $500 in matching funds per employee annually for projects that contribute to personal sustainability interests.
A living wage is the amount of income needed for one person to meet their basic needs without public or private assistance. The North Carolina minimum wage is $7.25/hour, for example, while the living wage for Durham, calculated by the city using a methodology tied to the federal poverty level, is $12.53/hour. To put it another way, that’s the difference between earning $15,000 a year and $25,000 a year. We’re proud to be a voluntary member of the Durham Living Wage Project.
We wouldn’t be doing our part to tackle climate change if we were working solely on adaptation strategies for farmers. The majority of the greenhouse gases contributing to climate change are produced in coffee-consuming countries, but the effects are unproportionally felt by farmers in producing countries. To address our emissions, we’ve calculated our greenhouse gas footprint and purchased offsets each year since 2010. We still have work to do on reducing our footprint, but we’ve refined our calculation methods and are making strides with each new facility we open.
