From day one, Bella's Beans has been committed to supporting our local community. Our Caring Coffee initiative helps raise money for Ohio nonprofits. Our Wear it Forward Program, which donates 200% of our profits to Ohio teachers, has funded many classroom projects that benefit children in poverty-stricken school districts. As we continue to grow, how we give back is also growing, and our latest initiative will have a global impact. It's called "Coffee for Life," and it will help feed food-insecure villages in Kenya.
Starting Earth Day 2022, for every batch of Bella's Beans sold, we will be planting a tree in the Lake Victoria Basin in Kisumu, Kenya. These trees will be more than just air cleaning workhorses; they will support the Kajulu Hills Ecovillages and will be integral to their restoration and conservation programs. Kajulu Hills is a nonprofit that provides permaculture training, support, and resources to food-insecure villages to teach them regenerative agricultural practices. They transform idle, dry, and degraded land into lush food-generating agro-ecosystems. These self-regenerating food ecosystems are created by implanting a seven-layered beneficial guild that ensures a permanent supply of natural and diversified food for humans and livestock.
Bella's Beans has teamed up with Kajulu Hills to plant coffee trees to provide shade and weed control for their agro-ecosystems and become a revenue-generating export. It takes about three years before you can start harvesting coffee, but when the time comes, we plan on buying this coffee from Kajulu Hills to roast and share it with our customers that made all of this possible.
Supporting the ecovillages in Kenya is only the first phase of our Coffee for Life initiative. Phase two involves our local coffee-loving besties who don't mind getting their hands dirty. We're developing tree kits that our customers will be able to request to grow their own native Ohio tree. These kits will recycle our coffee containers by converting them into growing pots. The dirt we provide with these kits uses Ohio-created compost that incorporates chaff, a byproduct of the coffee roasting process, from an exciting collaboration with Tilth Soil and the Rust Belt Riders in Cleveland.
Make sure to subscribe to our mailing list for exciting updates about this world-loving initiative and to learn how to receive you own free tree kit!
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