Photo of Dr. Timothy Schilling at origin (second from right), courtesy of SCA
The Specialty Coffee Association announced this week the 2020 SCA Sustainability Award winners: Las Manos del Café for the Project award; Cooperative Coffees for the Business Model award; and Dr. Timothy Schilling, founder of World Coffee Research, for the Sustainability Champion award.
All of the award winners will be recognized at the digital Re:co Symposium on Thursday, July 16.
“The growth in applications to the SCA’s sustainability awards—this year there were more than 70—reflects the specialty coffee community’s increasing engagement in sustainability,” says Kim Elena Ionescu, the SCA Chief Sustainability and Knowledge Development Officer. “This year’s winners have all demonstrated tenacity in the face of obstacles and doubts, and they are inspiring examples of what is possible with a powerful combination of vision, persistence, and collaboration.”
The Project and Business Model awards look for outstanding work in sustainability, while the Sustainability Champion award recognizes an individual working to change the specialty coffee sector with sustainability.
The winner of the Project award, Las Manos del Café, is a project by RGC Coffee Inc., whose objective is “to meet the needs of farmworkers, producers, and local organizations, while identifying alternatives to make employment within the coffee industry more socially viable.”
Recipient of the Business Model award, Cooperative Coffees is a Fair Trade and organic coffee importer working to improve the quality of life for small-scale farmers. It currently has 23 members in North America and 54 producer organizations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
Dr. Timothy Schilling, the Sustainability Champion winner, is also the president of World Coffee Research Europe. His long career in coffee has brought him to work extensively in food security for coffee-producing countries, and has “formed technological, human, and institutional capital that will serve coffee producers worldwide for decades to come,” says the SCA.
Congratulations to the winners! See how the SCA continuously adds to its sustainability work here.
