Midwest Hurricane

Cafe YO! - Made by Artists: Made by Youth: Making Community and a New Economy.

2012-01-04T04:21:00.000-08:00

It started seven years ago.

Loss of employment led a guy to start roasting 100% fair trade organic green coffee beans in some great and generous friends’ garage. Then selling it, bartering it, trading it for sandwiches and shoes and shelter, making a living while also raising funds for social change efforts ranging from the Chicago Women’s Health Center to Radios Populares to the Latino Union to West Town Bikes.

This endeavor became known as Resistance Coffee, and maybe you’ve seen it on the shelf at Newleaf Natural Grocery in Rogers Park.

Over two years ago, this quirky success morphed – not by growing into a larger, vertical, vertigo-producing corporation, mind you, but horizontally.

Two other fellas took up the original model, roasting on homemade equipment (BBQ grills! Propane! Dilapidated Garages! A field in Michigan!) with little or no investment, and now have parallel micro-endeavors, Grinderman Coffee (grindermancoffee.com), and Miscellaneous Treats. This trio call themselves the Chicago Coffee Confederation. This trio have gone on to bring in serious creative energy, artists of all kinds to assist with graphics, writing, artwork, web design, and even music related to social change and … coffee.

Last year, two of these roasters, David Meyers of Resistance Coffee and Michael McSherry of Grinderman, started working closely with the Latino Union in the creation of a larger project, called Café Chicago (CafeChicago.org). Café Chicago has grown into the city’s first immigrant-run worker-owned cooperative coffee roaster, toasting up fair trade organic beans grown by the women of La FEM cooperative, funding the immigrant rights work of the Latino Union (latinounion.org). Day laborers who've stood on corners braving bitter cold and extreme heat and boredom waiting for jobs to turn up, are now taking on all aspects of a coffee-roasting business. Not for profit, but for people and community.

Now the gang are up to something yet again.

The next phase of this movement, which is largely about growing community, economic justice, and the leveraging of resources and talents for people and the environment not profit, is youth-focused.

It’s a coffee venture.

It's Café YO!.

Café YO! Youth Organizing, Youth Occupying. The economy and the community.

The idea taking shape is the creation of a city-wide, youth-oriented coffee company. Fair trade? Check. Organic? Of course. Workers make the decisions? Mais oui. The workers and the creators this time - with the generous support and talents of a burgeoning group of adult artists, writers, musicians, activists, organizers who meet weekly at the Hideout's fantastic Bread and Soup gatherings – are youth. From across the city, we are coming together to not only roast, package, sell, and distribute this amazing coffee, but also to travel to countries of origin to establish relationships with coffee growers from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, and African countries.

Café YO! is also developing a citywide band of youth and adult musicians – bringing economics and creativity together in new ways. Another piece of the puzzle. Probably another story.

Café YO! is now making connections with teens around the city on street corners and through rad schools, and developing fundraising materials – a public relations packet, if you will. Funding will be forthcoming from various unions in Chicago and across the country, as well as from generous individuals of all stripes.

For the moment, funds are needed for generating and printing these PR materials, and for website development.

Over the next month, our friends at Newleaf will be proud to donate the proceeds from their tip jar - on the counter where you get your coffee (Café Chicago!) and your sandwiches and pay for your delicious foods – to the still-volunteer efforts of Café YO!.

Your first reward? Supporting - Making Possible - the very first stage of the very first youth-run, community-based fair trade organic coffee company in the country. In the world.

Your second reward? One day soon, drinking the coffee they bring.

[draft written for the newsletter that goes out to friends of Newleaf Natural Grocery]

The Cheetah and the Waterfall: Unleashing the Creativity of a New Era

2011-12-27T12:23:00.000-08:00

Remaking the Economy of the City

Greetings from a small batch of do-it-yourself folks, operating out of garages and backyards, tiny offices and cozy apartments; roaming the savanna.

We no longer see the need nor have the time to fuck around with mutant ideas of profit like green, natural, social, or ethical capitalism. We hunger for liberation, not the glory of the con artist.

More and more of us are promoting large-scale, imaginative change in the real world by first taking our energies out of the current economic and social structures and putting them at the service of living well in and supporting our communities.

We are stripping the mask off the “free market,” that ugly tool of the ruling classes, and replacing it with a free and ethical exchange model that wears no velvet gloves nor forms any iron fist. Our model needs no state for enforcement but grows with the free will and good intentions of honest people willing to defend what bits of our lives we can salvage from the overlords.

From this salvage operation, we are finding, with a little luck and as we apply ourselves with verve, that the powers of equality, creativity, muscular action, and thoughtful direction we are putting into play can upset the best laid plans of the overlords.

We strive not to be the little kings of yesteryear, each with his own little domain to protect and enforce and abuse. We are men and women, girls and boys, with vast creativity that we are now unleashing into the world, free of capital and its dictates. We are confederated and free of sluggishness.

We are simultaneously free of the tame and newly-minted ideas of some children of the bourgeoisie who are now seeking to remake a shifting world into one that maintains and fortifies their access to flows of status and wealth in a new world. We are not seeking to capitalize on the new era for old-fashioned self and status and wealth; we are imagining a world where all may feed, clothe, house, and love themselves and others unabashedly.

We have found viable means of creating meaningful, self-determined work without capitalist ownership or bureaucratic spirit-killing. We put people before profits, eliminating profit from all levels of coffee service and consumption in a major city as a first step in modeling the elimination of profit from all levels of economic activity. In substituting a focus on social justice and social change for profit-making, we find that people are responsive to and appreciate our practices.

We prioritize ideas that have the potential for dramatic economic and cultural transformation. There is very little political and social power without economic power. There is greater economic and social power in taking over essential chunks of the economy, like food and clothing and manufacturing, than there is in making specialty items or fetishes, things that only certain people can afford.

Our work is an experimental incubator, pursuing the ideas and practices that feed a transformation of this capitalist economy into one that serves the real economic and ecological needs of all people and the earth. We are consolidating resources and ideas apart from the usual segregated pathways of class, ethnicity or color, and gender.

We are addressing the current site-specific problems of capital, not last century’s. We are not Marx nor Kropotkin, nor are we in any way associated with the current batch of wacko right-wingers.

We confederate our knowledge and practices and our resources, a loose style appropriate to the era and aware of the need to flee the jack-boots that knock on the door from time to time.

We are weaving strings of horizontal relationships, not cumbersome and slavery-dependent pyramids.

We put all poor people at the table. We are relatively poor whites and we act from here. We are legion, many or most of us are not as stupid as portrayed by those who find themselves superior to us. We are more capable of concerted action than a thousand atomized and isolated lovers of social classes and their status. We speak for ourselves, not through the lusterless representatives this system has coughed up, nor through book-based sociologists of poverty nor the white trash-fakers of the art world.

We long for an end to social classes, and the deformation of personalities that they produce. And an end to the line artificially dividing wealth from the majority of the people of this earth.

We promote lateral, horizontal expansion, determined by the interests and energies of our companions. We move beyond the level of micro, while maintaining horizontal growth – growth that seeks the participation of all Chicagoans who are interested, with full participation especially amongst the most vulnerable and the poorest.

Sometimes we choose to roast and purvey coffee out of happenstance, luck, and also the ease with which it can be value-added and delivered. Coffee is an essential for it cuts the edge off hunger, which after all is all too common.

Traditional methods of organization and control are not adequate to meet the new reality we live in. Nor are traditional methods of liberation.

Our movement open sources new information.

Our movement also open-sources the inspiration that is the real fuel for the motivation to make change real and large.

We look to the practices of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies), seeking to completely organize a single industry. The Confederation seeks to further decentralize organizing and structure. We’re more like kudzu than the gardens at Versailles. New media and social networking technologies, integrated with old-school, nuts-and-bolts social action, will yield a clear, concrete model of turning capitalism on its head, with theoretical flights applied to the current context.

We span great distances with energy and inspiration and skills, not through fluorescent strategic planning and other tools of a deceptive management society.

We will “scale up,” and we will scale as we see fit, not as outsiders with little practical knowledge dictate.

Will our revolution be slow, stymied by endless process and strategy sessions that never leave the desk or the disk and devolve into endless discussions of principles?

We think not.

Will our efforts be rewarded, when we make a world free of the useless borders between peoples and the boundaries that separate us from the healthy aspects of wealth – like roofs and good food and health care and the riches of love?

We think so.

Our theories are grand, so that our practices may fill with grandeur. And vice-versa.

We rush and we roar like the waterfall. Pounce like the cheetah.

Cafe Chicago Hits the Ground Running, Stumbling, and Flying. All at the Same Time.

2011-12-20T20:21:00.000-08:00

Cafe Chicago has hit the ground, running, stumbling, and flying. All at the same time.

First, the ground. We are creating a reality where the immigrant day laborers who are involved in Cafe Chicago can one day take it on fully, themselves, with the proper training. Personally, I did not know how much work this would be, but we are all committed to the idea, and the transfer is taking huge amounts of energy and time. That said, our cooperative members are taking on responsibilities as they can, and though it would have been easier to start a fair trade organic coffee company that funds social change and run by experienced outsiders, we really are maintaining a vision that we believe will prove to be where the deeper transformation happens, economic, social, and really, spiritual. Putting the workers in the drivers' seat.

We've had events at the Workers Center where 75 people showed up from all round Chicago, eager to learn about our work, wanting to take the ideas back to their communities, listening and singing along with the singer songwriters we've brought in to document our work in musical form. And it is here that we now realize, we've sparked a bona fide grassroots movement. From below. Pretty intense.

The cooperative has four regular members, and a dozen other day laborers involved in various ways, less regularly.

We've gotten huge name recognition in Chicago, while selling maybe 80-100 lbs of coffee per week (tiny!). We are working out so many glitches that come up with our language barriers, people's previous lack of experience of taking responsibility and ownership, lack of experience with business ....

But we seem to hit on the right methods slowly, and are good at bringing in outside support (for example, our college professor friend who is working on our Business Plan with us, has provided an amazing clarifying and focusing of our mission and our business). So, hitting the ground's proven to have quite a few stumbles, but we are learning to walk.

It helps to have a damn good rich and chocolatey coffee, from La FEM in the highlands of Nicaragua. At La FEM, the women who participate in the cooperative not only grow these magical beans but teach and learn construction and other building skills essential to further survival and thriving.

Our name recognition is coming through word of mouth; and a lot of writing skills put to good use in social media; the sway of the Latino Union and of the Chicago Coffee Confederation in different and complementary arenas; it's a real nice mish mash.

We have very good networks with almost all segments of Chicago's arts, radical, immigrant, worker, and progressive communities and our organizations. Our media work has exceeded all expectations, and is where we are flying: an article in internationally-read Latin American Herald Tribune; ChicagoUnionNews.com did a piece that put us in front of Chicago's unions (and national ones as well); and a piece on ABC7 News during primetime, probably the biggest visual media in Chicago, where we performed quite quite well. The New York Times will be around soon, it's the first media avenue I've begun to actively pursue.

All that said, we are now aware that we are not only a part of a large-scale economic seachange, but a leading voice. A tugboat. And we are keeping in mind, because we've sparked so many imaginations and tapped into a model of grasping and taking the reins of self-determination, that we can assist others in creating similar endeavors. Whether in coffee or other essentials. We hope to work with some of the other organizations in the National Day Labor Organizing Network, to establish ten more Cafe ______'s in different cities, by the end of 2013. They've been calling us, watching us, supporting us.

Locally, we've identified other niches where projects like worker-owned Cafe Chicago would have wide open space for success (such as a fair trade organic tortilleria), and rather than thinking we can do this too, will start working with others so that they can begin the process. Expanding horizontally, as the Chicago Coffee Confederation has, rather than vertically.

There's a lot more that could be said, but I wanted to let you know where we're at, and again thank you for your support, that support has proven to be vital to our sense that yes, we can do this, and others think so too.

So Thanks! And happy holidays to you ...

David
on behalf of Cafe Chicago

"From the City of Big Shoulders, Not Big Overpriced Lattes ... "

2010-03-24T10:14:00.001-07:00

Café Chicago

A Project of the Latino Union of Chicago and the Chicago Coffee Confederation

Generating New Models of Social Action, Job Creation, and Not-for-Profit Funding

Café Chicago is a worker-made, worker-owned, and worker-operated cooperative that will roast, package, and distribute great tasting, fair trade, organic coffee in the Chicago area. With a new model of fostering social action, creating new economic engines, and generating cooperative forms of ownership and vision, Cafe Chicago will make living wage jobs and provide training in coffee roasting and cooperative management while funding the social justice organizing of the Latino Union at a time of dwindling non-profit funding. By combining a Workers’ Center and hiring hall for immigrant day laborers with a café and coffee roaster, Café Chicago will serve as a gathering place for community members who share values of cooperation and collaboration and want to act in solidarity with the poor. It will create new public, working class, democratic spaces for collective action, where workers and community members can gather for socializing and cultural and musical exchange, and to find work.

The Actors and the Analysis.
The Latino Union and the Chicago Coffee Confederation share a motivation to support the rights of low-income immigrants in Chicago. These organizations are committed to generating a project - Café Chicago – that addresses issues of economic injustice while spurring a movement towards self-determination and empowerment among the city’s most vulnerable residents, the day laborers who congregate by the hundreds on the city’s street corners seeking work.Café Chicago seeks to address real and growing economic and social failures within our society. Immigrants are exploited by our economic and business models, then targeted for repression by nativist and anti-immigrant groups. A class of owners and managers not doing the actual work makes decisions in the work place. Jobs are often meaningless and often put workers into the unfortunate role of constructing their own demise (i.e., day laborers and other workers in low-income areas building and renovating the condos that will ultimately displace them from their own neighborhood).

The ongoing economic recession centered on the collapsed housing industry, corrupt and predatory financial firms and disproportionate allocation of government resources on military spending has led to the erosion of the social safety net, a double digit unemployment rate and conditions ripe for worker exploitation. Rates of poverty, joblessness, homelessness, foreclosure, and workplace abuses have skyrocketed, placing grassroots not-for-profits in a two-fold dilemma: an increased demand for support and organizing from struggling communities and depleted resources as corporate, foundation, government and individual contributions decline.

The Latino Union recognizes the need for a new model that values human beings and our longing for freedom, justice and community at every step of the process and seeks to establish alternative economic structures that model a different way of making a living, of developing real vocation, of funding social change. This new models of social interaction prizes equality, integrates community organizing and economic justice, promotes cooperation and solidarity through collaboration, and builds communities in resistance to poverty, oppression and injustice. Café Chicago grows out of this search for real alternatives by the staff and day laborers of Latino Union of Chicago and out of the experience of solidarity-minded small-batch coffee roasters from the Chicago Coffee Confederation who making a living roasting fair trade, organic coffee while raising much-needed funds for women’s equality, immigrant rights, and other social justice organizations. The project joins the Latino Union’s six years of experience in running a day laborer-run hiring hall that’s provided wages over 150% higher than the street corner average with zero incidents of wage theft, with the Chicago Coffee Confederation, and its six years of community coffee roasting experience providing fair trade, organic coffee to Chicagoans that also generates $2,000 annually to social justice organizations including the Latino Union. Building on this history, the organizations are partnering to launch Café Chicago.

Café Chicago grows out of the Latino Union’s work and that of the Chicago Coffee Confederation, both working to fight the root cause of poverty and oppression. It grows out of a desire and a commitment to creating meaningful, living wage and socially relevant work owned and controlled by workers themselves.

Worker Cooperative Model: Embedded Social Enterprise.
Café Chicago utilizes the mission-centric embedded social enterprise model that locates enterprise activities within the Latino Union’s community organizing and is central to its mission of developing the tools necessary to collectively improve social and economic conditions for low income, immigrant workers. The comprehensive relationship of this model is the simultaneous achievement of financial, social and economic benefits for low-income workers in Chicagoland. Café Chicago is being incorporated as a for-profit venture, with profits going fully to fund the work of the Latino Union.

Café Chicago’s embedded social enterprise is a worker cooperative that employs the following business activities and strategies:
- Grassroots Marketing - Educational marketing through various social media outlets will educate the public about the day labor movement, the positive community impact of purchasing the coffee, and the social benefits of fair trade, worker cooperative purchasing;
- Localized Distribution - Coffee will be directly delivered by day laborers by bike and by CTA (creating a whole other set of jobs and Latino Union outreach avenues), and sold to local restaurants, community organizations, and progressive Chicagoans who want their purchases to go beyond fair trade and organic, to promote movement building and social change;
- Just & Quality Coffee – In addition to freshly roasted, delicious tasting coffee, Café Chicago products will incorporate environmentally friendly, socially responsible practices in all steps of the process;
- Positive Social Impact – Café Chicago integrates international solidarity, leadership development, worker organizing, and self-determination into its cooperative model to enact change that improves the lives of the poor locally and internationally;
- Financial Sustainability – By combining low-income job creation and training with a Workers’ Center earned income program, Café Chicago strengthens its impact through self-sufficient fundraising that supports a broader community of day laborers.

Collaboration and Partnerships.
Both the Latino Union and the Chicago Coffee Confederation are generating outside support for Café Chicago. Alderman Helen Shiller has offered space within the proposed Green Center she and activists in Uptown are creating near Broadway and Sunnyside. This location would not only provide space for the roasting operation, but also establish a partnership with many other poor people’s organizations concerned with issues of justice and environmental sustainability.

Additional support is being generated by holding informational and energy-generating events in different parts of the city at sites such as the Mess Hall in Rogers Park, and with other organizations that share a commitment to justice. Technical support for starting up the roasting operation will come from the Chicago Coffee Confederation’s long-time relationship with Just Coffee staff in Madison, Wisconsin and with New Leaf Natural Grocery in Chicago. The Confederation’s staff is currently engaged in research into the formation, structure, and maintenance of worker-owned cooperatives by interviewing staff at Just Coffee and Peace Coffee in Minnesota.

Café Chicago Operational Focus and Strategies.
Café Chicago will take the expertise of the garage roasters of the Chicago Coffee Confederation (CCC) and expand its work horizontally and on a much larger scale by blending that experience with the work of the Latino Union. The Latino Union’s track record of working for justice with day laborers and low-income, immigrant communities, combined with the organization’s long-standing partnership with the CCC, leads to a new idea for funding the Latino Union during tough economic times.

The roasting operation will also benefit the community work of many other social justice organizations in Chicago. Making environmentally responsible, energy-efficient, high-speed roasting equipment available for use by other organizations will generate funds for programs and projects that get sidelined in the process of seeking declining corporate and governmental funding. Using some features of community-based bike shops like Working Bikes and Ciclo Urbano, the hub will also open its doors and its expertise to youth seeking out meaningful work, experience and knowledge of the world, and to others interested in the art and craft of socially-relevant coffee roasting and organizing for social justice. Café Chicago will rock “the city that works” within a collective and democratic framework that challenges the business status quo. Rather than generating profits for a single owner and a managerial class, this project will serve to replace dwindling not-for-profit funding for Latino Union, while generating living wage jobs and work that provides a sense of accomplishment that can only enhance a social justice movement rooted in self-determination, empowerment and poverty alleviation.

By initiating Café Chicago, the Latino Union is increasing workers’ power over working conditions and taking decision making out of the hands of exploitative employers, and putting that power into the hands of the immigrant workers. Café Chicago has developed the following four-year strategy, ensuring that the project is successful and sustainable and that justice is served from coffee grower to shipper to Café Chicago worker to organizational supporters – the customers who buy Café Chicago. By the end of four years, Café Chicago will be generating 100% of the Latino Union’s current level of funding, supplementing the organization’s work and replacing funding lost during this economic downturn.

Year One
Secure Start-Up Resources: Raise funds necessary for project startup, set at $50,000 for procuring equipment and consumable and non-consumable supplies, paying rent and utilities, and ensuring three months’ wages and oversight costs. Because of collaboration with the Chicago Coffee Confederation, three months’ wages will prove sufficient, for distribution networks and relationships with retail and wholesale outlets are already established, allowing the project to hit the ground running. Wages will be paid out of coffee sales in full three months after project startup.

Market and Promote Café Chicago Citywide: A crucial component of our financial strategy is bringing the work of the Latino Union and the plight of immigrant day laborers to the attention of the city’s progressive community, particularly in and around immigrant and gentrifying neighborhoods. The day laborers working within Café Chicago will initiate and conduct door-to-door marketing through flyering, and setting up coffee sampling tables at train stops at rush hour. Staff and workers will tap into extensive social networking avenues. And, media contacts in large citywide print media have explicitly expressed their desire to write and publish stories about the inception of Café Chicago, as have local and national NPR broadcasters. This media splash will support the very localized, word-of-mouth nature of our startup plan.

Establish Job Creation, Training, and Leadership Development Components: Months one to six will commence with equipment setup and training, with roasting and sales beginning at the end of month one. With current contacts, both general and organizational, income will begin at a rate of $1,000 per week at the end of month one. Contact with cafes and other retail and wholesale outlets begins month two. Strategy focuses on providing a quality coffee grown by La FEM women’s cooperative in Nicaragua – fair trade and organic – at a reasonable price, but one where the social enterprise nature of the project will garner wide support from Chicago’s large progressive social justice community. Experiences related by folks at Just Coffee in Madison and Peace Coffee in Minneapolis support the idea that Chicago is hungry for coffee that goes beyond fair trade and organic, that has a focus on justice and liberation as well. To build relationships with these roasters, Café Chicago’s project board and workers will lead a delegation to Just Coffee to promote exchange, development, and movement building amongst fellow worker cooperatives. Simultaneous with this approach of cafes and businesses, the model of direct marketing and delivery by bicycle and public transportation used for six years by members of the Chicago Coffee Confederation will evolve into an equal role. Direct marketing has the benefit of eliminating the middleman, thus returning far more of the cost of the coffee to the project and the organization.

Stabilize Cooperative Operations: Months seven to twelve will see the stabilization of Café Chicago brand name in Chicago, working first within the city’s progressive community. By the end of year one, the sale of 500 pounds of coffee per week will put the organization at a point where one-fifth of its funding is provided by coffee sales. Upon completing technology training, provided by Latino Union staff, Café Chicago workers will be capacitated to use the comprehensive, online data-tracking software Salesforce to drill down production, clientele, distribution, and sale trends.

With a slow buildup, starting with roasting 100 pounds of coffee per week, by the end of year one Café Chicago projects roasting 500 pounds per week. Total coffee roasted for year one, 18,000 pounds. With a projected price per pound of $10 (average of wholesale and retail), this is a gross income of $180,000. With costs set at $6.67 per pound, or two thirds of gross, this nets $60,000 of unrestricted funds for the Latino Union. This could be accomplished on the Sivetz 10-pound roaster with relative ease; the quarter-bag roaster (37-pound) would lessen the time spent roasting, and would not need to be replaced after two years of our projected growth. Labor costs per pound are placed at $1 per pound, based on our mentoring company’s current costs.

Year Two
Sustainably Expand Market: Year two brings Café Chicago to the wider coffee-drinking public in Chicago, exposing the coffee and the work of the organization to a much wider audience. Marketing strategy continues along the lines of working through word-of-mouth, social networking, and media attention – not simply drawing attention to our product, but to the work of the Latino Union. This marketing supports our financial strategy of a slow but steady build in sales, one that allows Café Chicago to grow at a rate that allows for constant toggling, reflection on process, and ensuring that product, marketing, and profits remain in line with the organization’s primary work. Anticipated outcomes at the end of year two are to net over $100,000 to fund the organization’s work, while employing 15 day laborers part-time at a living wage, roasting and delivering coffee and staffing the cafe.

Year Three
Develop and Expand Organizing Capacity: Upon establishing a successful workers’ cooperative/workers’ center model, Café Chicago will achieve a level of viability capable of making significant financial contributions to the development and expansion of workers centers’ programming capacity. Coupling the expanded resources and capacity with the changing demands and realities of the underground contingent worker economy, the project will have the tools to broaden the scope of community organizing, public policy advocacy, leadership development, and coalition work used by Latino Union to realize its mission. Anticipated outcomes are increasing income by 50% and employing 2 day labor organizers full time.

Promote Café Chicago as a National Model: After three years of development and operation, Café Chicago will serve as a national model for worker organizations seeking to address economic and social shortcomings within current dominant employment structures while building grassroots social justice movements. Through detailed data and development tracking and the compiling of personal expertise and three years of hands-on experience, Latino Union will collaborate with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network to create comprehensive training resources and materials for the 42 member workers centers on how to create, establish, and develop an embedded social enterprise of workers-cooperatives for low-income, immigrant worker organizations.

Year Four
By the end of year four, we project that Cafe Chicago will net the Latino Union funds equal to the organization's current budget, over $300,000.

Cafe Chicago Market Analysis and Strategy.
The market for Café Chicago’s coffee is nearly untapped in the city of Chicago.

There are many small to medium coffee roasting businesses in Chicago, as in any city. What Chicago lacks is a business whose goal is not monetary profit, but furthering the social change work of a prominent, local justice-seeking organization. In fact, there is no such existing coffee roaster in the country doing this work at present.

In Chicago, local roasting is dominated by two medium-sized companies, Intelligensia and Metropolis. Several smaller companies, including Castillo and Bridgeport, also have some market share. While all make a point to offer some fair trade organic coffees, and all use some sort of ‘direct trade’ algebra in the procurement of their beans, merely ensuring a good price be paid for beans does not guarantee many other areas of concern to justice and social change seekers.

What most progressives, radicals, and fair trade and living wage advocates want, is a coffee that has been ushered into their coffee cups with attention not only to fair prices and sustainable organic growing practices, but a comprehensive, justice-based approach at every step. What Café Chicago offers is fair trade, organic coffee. What Café Chicago offers, in addition, is a social change vision. This includes choosing coffees that go beyond fair trade standards, that might benefit the liberation of women in Nicaragua, the Zapatista struggle in Chiapas – that benefit liberation struggles, a focus that is not necessarily part and parcel of the fair trade model. Additionally, Café Chicago ensures living wages at its roasting facility; ensures that we as workers learn the cooperative skills and social consciousness that come with consensus decision making and that will build strong, resilient social movements; and ensures that all profits go to the furtherance of the struggles of immigrant day laborers with whom the Latino Union has been working for a decade.

The only company marketing in Chicago with a similar (but non-local) focus is Just Coffee, based in Madison, Wisconsin. Just Coffee does ensure justice at each stage of their process, from plantation to coffee cup, and raises much-needed funds for organizations around the country. Café Chicago is fortunate to have a long-standing and cordial relationship with Just Coffee, where our marketing strategies can be geared in such a way that we can work together, rather than in competition.

Café Chicago’s marketing strategy is inseparable from the organization’s overall strategy of improving the social and economic conditions of immigrant workers and communities in Chicago. The model looks at the solidarity sentiments of the city’s progressive and radical communities, and assesses how to best bring those sentiments into an active role in supporting immigrant workers’ rights.

Towards this end, we have developed the following short-range but expandable marketing strategy, which will ensure the future success and sustainability of the project while ensuring that justice is served in every cup of coffee.

Café Chicago will tap Chicago’s nearly-untapped market for a fair trade, organic, liberation-oriented coffee in a hundred ways, utilizing the tools of the day, the talents of an ever-widening circle of supporters, and the six years’ experience of our partners in the Chicago Coffee Confederation (CCC). The CCC has already established distribution networks and relationships with retail and wholesale outlets, which in and of themselves will allow the project to hit the ground running at the projected rate mentioned in our financial projections. In fact, if Café Chicago only utilizes the CCC connection, the project is already self-sustaining.

But Café Chicago is set to operate on a much larger scale than the microroasting efforts of the CCC, which includes opening a full café by mid-2011, a café which also serves the vital social function of a Workers Center, on the model of the Latino Union’s current Albany Park Workers Center.

A crucial component of our marketing strategy is bringing the work of the Latino Union and the plight of immigrant day laborers to the attention of the city’s progressive community, particularly in and around immigrant and gentrifying neighborhoods. The day laborers working with Café Chicago and the Latino Union will initiate and conduct door-to-door marketing through flyering, and set up coffee sampling tables at train stops at rush hour. Staff and workers will tap into extensive social networking avenues, from Twitter to Facebook to MySpace.

Media contacts in large city-wide print media have explicitly expressed their desire to write and publish stories about the inception of Café Chicago, as have local and national NPR broadcasters. This media splash will support the very localized, word-of-mouth nature of our startup plan. The media-friendly nature of the project eliminates the need to spend money on advertising.

Our marketing strategy will continue and expand along the lines of working through door-to-door contact, word-of-mouth, social networking, and media attention – drawing attention to our product, but also to the work of the Latino Union. This supports our financial strategy of a slow but steady build in sales, one that allows us – day laborers and staff – to grow at a rate that allows for constant toggling, reflection on process, and sustainable development of a new model, while ensuring that product, marketing, and profits remain in line with the organization’s primary work.

Café Chicago One-Year Timeline.

March to September, 2010.
Secure Funding.
Incorporate.
Develop Full Business Plan.
Set Up Accounting System.
Develop Logo and Marketing Materials, Hone Direct Marketing Strategies – Social Media, Email, Word-of-Mouth.
Connect with Café Chicago Customers: Cafés, Stores, Caterers, Individuals.
Continue Conceptualization of Café Chicago as a Social Enterprise, an Integral Part of the Latino Union Mission, and as a Site for Social Change.
Develop Relationships with Suppliers of Fair Trade Organic Coffee, Packaging.
Develop Labels with Local Artists.
Hold Two Cultural and Musical Fundraisers.
Get Press.
Buy Coffee Roaster, Coffee Supplies, Packaging Materials.
Install Coffee Roaster, Prepare Space.
Consult with Café Chicago Mentors: Jeff Furman of Ben and Jerry’s, Mike Moon of Just Coffee, Steve Parkes of New Leaf Natural Grocery.

September, 2010.
Delegation of Day Laborers to Annual Coop Coffees of America Meeting.
Develop Worker Cooperative, Discuss and Implement Consensus Decision-making.
Begin Roasting, at rate of 100 pounds of coffee per week.
Continue, Expand Marketing Efforts. Train day laborers in marketing.

October to December, 2010.
Expand Roasting Operations to 250 pounds per week.
Develop and Maintain Presence at Farmers’ Markets, Special Events.
Begin Holding Cultural Events Supporting Café Chicago.

January to August, 2011.
Expand Roasting Operations to 500 pounds per week.
Find Space for Café / Workers Center, to Open December 2011.

Conclusion.
Café Chicago: a worker-owned and worker-operated cooperative coffee roasting venture; an attached café and hiring hall; a model for funding the vital work of a low-income immigrant worker rights organization; a model for a bottom-up rather than top-down approach to the development of alternative economic structures, and thus a model of economic self-determination; a step towards low-income empowerment. Working to end poverty in this city that works, Café Chicago’s priorities of organizing, collaboration, cooperation, and solidarity contribute to vibrant, flourishing communities of justice, equality and liberation.

“Cafe Chicago. Taking the Windy City back to its roots as the City of Big Shoulders, Not the City of Big, Overpriced Lattes.”

About the Latino Union of Chicago.
The Latino Union is a democratic, worker-led organization that continually seeks to develop and expand the leadership and collective action of day laborers city wide. The organization creates alternative market interventions in the unregulated day labor sector that improve economic and social conditions for low-income, immigrant workers while building a grassroots movement for immigrant worker rights.

Founded in 2000 by women day laborers, the Latino Union of Chicago collaborates with low-income immigrant workers to develop the tools necessary to collectively improve social and economic conditions. The organization develops grassroots leadership from within the immigrant corner day laborer community, creates feasible alternatives that address the injustices immigrant workers face in Chicagoland, and works to build the broader grassroots movement for immigrant workers' rights. As the only organization that works with Chicagoland corner day laborers, the Latino Union's membership comprises the most vulnerable sector of the immigrant worker community. Workers who congregate on street corners where employers hire them on a temporary basis encounter situations of extreme poverty, exclusion by community, language barriers, and lack of designated physical spaces in which to congregate to find work, along with physical and verbal abuse. Adding to these challenges associated with day labor across the country, a national study published by UIC and UCLA cited the Midwest as the worst region in the country for corner day labor. Sixty-six percent of such workers experience theft of wages at least once in a two month period while one third will experience a serious workplace injury in the course of one year. Building on a successful history of organizing activity which led to the passing of various legislative changes and the establishment in 2004 of the first Workers' Center for street corner day laborers in the Midwest, the Latino Union continues to focus on addressing the sources of poverty through internal community organizing and education constantly backed by leadership development within the immigrant community.

About the Chicago Coffee Confederation.
The Café Chicago project will collaborate with the Chicago Coffee Confederation, a group of small batch coffee roasters who support fair trade economic relationships and social justice movements and creative work. The Confederation’s Principles are:
- Through the roasting of coffee, provide a decent hourly wage to the roaster.
- Raise funds beyond wages, at least once per year, for a social or creative cause that seeks change in the world.
- Support sustainable environmental and human practices by roasting and selling beans that are at least fair trade and organic. Preference is given to buying beans from cooperatives whose work is part of a movement towards liberation.
- Where feasible and needed, work together to support the confederation and each other’s work (i.e., ordering beans and bags in bulk to reduce costs, referring customers to each other based on geographical closeness)
The CCC will provide initial technical coffee roasting and distribution training to day laborers who will oversee the preparation, packaging, and distribution of fair trade organic coffee. Workers capacitated to manage operations facilitate future trainings for additional day laborers, low-income workers, and youth to both conduct the operations of Café Chicago and also gain job training skills transferable to other coffee businesses and cooperatives.

Café Chicago: A New Model of Social Action in the City that Caffeinates

2009-10-23T04:13:00.000-07:00

The economic, social, and environmental collapse that we swim in may be happening so slowly that we are not able to detect its downward spiral in our day-to-day lives. But it is taking place, and we need to evolve much more quickly than we have been. We need bolder action. We need to spawn viable alternatives while also actively resisting the corporate and state forces out to repress, distress, and brutalize us as they protect wealth and privilege.

That paragraph's perhaps an odd way to start a brief description of the new activities being launched by Resistance Coffee and its umbrella Chicago Coffee Confederation, but it does provide some insight into the motivations behind such projects as Café Chicago.

Café Chicago seeks to address real and growing failures within our warfare-oriented, corporate-dominated, ethically challenged society. Decisions in the work place are made by a class of owners and managers not doing that actual work. Immigrants are exploited by our economic and business models, then targeted for repression and deportation when nativists get restless. Jobs are often meaningless and often put workers into the unfortunate role of constructing their own demise (example, day laborers and other workers in low-income areas building and renovating the condos that will make the area unlivable for those workers all too soon).

Too often we are forced into compromising our values, because we can't afford to maintain our values. If we are lucky, we buy shitty pesticide-laden produce because organic is too expensive; if we live in the vast food deserts of the South and West Sides, pork rinds and synthesized cupcakes are our side dishes. We drive and drive and drive because it is in someone's interest to block construction of affordable and effective public transportation. We buy coffee grown under old-style plantation-like conditions, sold to us by baristas who hate their jobs but need to make a living.

It’s time for a different model, one that values human beings and our longing for freedom and for justice and community. We need alternatives that don’t find us hiding our heads in the sand, but that continue to challenge those forces hell-bent on destroying our city, our planet, and our lives. It's time for a different model of making a living, of funding social change whether radical or revolutionary or alternative-building. It’s time for new models of social interaction that prize each and every voice, and that build community and resistance.

Café Chicago grows out of this search for real alternatives, and out of the experience of a small-batch coffee roaster toiling in a freezing cold garage trying to make a living roasting fair trade, organic, liberation-oriented coffee over the past five years on a backyard barbeque grill while raising much-needed funds for feminist, immigrant, and other radical organizations. Café Chicago grows out of the recently formed Chicago Coffee Confederation, which now has three homemade micro-roasters spinning in three different garages, with several more in the works. We are working together to support ourselves, our communities, our organizations and creative work, and of course to support the very real desire for great tasting, consumer-fetish-free coffee. It grows out of a desire to create meaningful, living wage, socially relevant work in an atmosphere free of ugly power relations.

The first small-batch, homemade coffee roaster.

The idea that is forming is to take the expertise of the garage roasters of the Chicago Coffee Confederation and expand our work horizontally and on a much larger scale via a working relationship with a vital social change organization in Chicago. We will be working with a prominent group working with day laborers and immigrant communities to construct a worker-made, worker-owned, and worker-operated cooperative that will roast coffee in full-sized, energy-efficient machinery.

Money generated by Café Chicago will be used to support the workers doing the work, and to support the work of the organization. An attached cafe will serve as a gathering place for people who value such work, people doing that work, and for people who share values of cooperation and mutual aid and want to act in solidarity with those at the bottom. This hub, Café Chicago, will also benefit the work of many other change organizations in Chicago, generating funds for these organizations and also serving to generate funds for projects that get sidelined in the process of seeking restrictive corporate and governmental funding.

Using some features of communal bike shops like Working Bikes and Ciclo Urbano, our hub will open its doors and its expertise to youth seeking out meaningful work and experience and knowledge of the world, to low-income activists and artists needing to augment their incomes, and to others interested in the art and craft of socially-relevant coffee roasting.

Café Chicago’s gonna rock this city that works, but we’re going to work it a different way. If you wanna participate, write and let us know who what when where and how, and probably especially why.

The revolution may not be well-funded (yet); the revolution will be caffeinated.

Coffee bean porn.