10/14/2008

By Renée Graham

Stephen Coffey is using both his business and legal savvy to help those a half-world away in Rwanda, the East African nation wracked for decades by poverty and genocide.
 
Launched in 2005, Coffey’s company, Thousand Hills Coffee, seeks to introduce American java junkies to the greatest resource from the country known as the land of a thousand hills: coffee. With its high altitude, ample rainfall, and volcanic soil, Rwanda enjoys some of the world’s most favorable coffee-growing conditions. At the same time, proceeds from coffee sales are helping to subsidize the Maranyundo School, a secondary educational institution for girls in Rwanda’s Nyamata region.

“We’re selling great-tasting coffee and we’re working to help the people of Rwanda,” Coffey says. “It’s a great combination.”

Coffey, who got his JD from Suffolk in 2001, had little knowledge about Rwanda until 2003, when a friend asked him to help with a fundraiser for a girls’ school there. At the time, Coffey knew what most Americans knew about that east-central African country. In 1994, Rwanda suffered through a genocide that pitted Hutus against Tutsis, neighbor against neighbor, leading to the slaughter of more than 800,000 people. When Coffey watched Ghosts of Rwanda, a shattering 2004 documentary about the genocide, he was outraged that no nation, including the United States, stepped in to stop the massacre.

Coffey paid his first visit to Rwanda in 2005, during which he visited a farmers’ cooperative. It was an incredibly moving experience for him. “We were driving to Musasa Cooperative...As we were going up the hill, you could just see the development because of the coffee farms where all these people were now working...And I thought, ‘Wow, this could be me making a big impact.’”

With coffee, Coffey—and yes, he’s heard just about every joke imaginable about his surname and his company’s product—found his mission. In a New York Times story published in 2006, Kevin J. Mullally, then head of the office of the United States Agency for International Development in Rwanda, explained that “by improving the quality of their coffee, about 40,000 of Rwanda’s 500,000 coffee farmers have at least doubled their incomes. Coffee has played a crucial role in positive changes in Rwanda.”

At this point, Coffey’s company is still a fledgling business. He’s not making a lot of money, either as a profit-generating venture or a philanthropic endeavor. Coffey looks to Ben & Jerry’s—the hugely successful Vermont-based ice cream company as much recognized for its social activism as for its trademark flavors, such as Cherry Garcia and Chunky Monkey—as a model for Thousand Hills Coffee Company.

In five years, Coffey hopes his product will be available in high-end supermarkets like Whole Foods Market, but for now, he has his hands full keeping the business afloat. With a law degree, Coffey would seem just a high-powered corporate job away from solving his financial woes, but he refuses to see things that way.

What he sees is Rwanda, a place he calls “amazing” and “an addiction,” where its greatest resource may not be coffee, but rather the indefatigable spirit of a people bent, but unbroken, by past hardships.

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