Collaborating with Your Community | 25, Issue 15
Issue 15 sponsor, Pacific Barista Series, shares its approach to developing and delivering community support programs.
In The Great Good Place, sociologist Ray Oldenburg identifies three realms—home, work, and socially inclusive places—imperative to the functioning of civil society. These “third places,” including coffee spaces, are places to exchange ideas, enjoy ourselves, and build relationships. In other words, they’re natural community-builders. As the pandemic unfolded, so too did a kind of mutual symbiosis between coffee spaces and their communities: coffee retail businesses who pivoted and transitioned to meet the needs of their local communities, further strengthening ties, weathered the storm better than those who didn’t.
For coffee businesses who want to take a more proactive approach to strengthening their local community ties, finding the best way to collaborate with your community on key initiatives can feel daunting. Not sure where to start? To help you begin with your own journey of community integration, Pacific Barista Series shares learnings from its 30-year experience growing community support programs across both its local and shared-interest communities.
Align
Before you can choose a key initiative, you need to make sure you’ve outlined your mission. If you’ve never identified a mission for your coffee business, it might feel a bit weird to write it down, but it’s such a useful tool! Your mission statement will help you drive your business forward, giving you a touchstone when evaluating any new initiative you want to undertake, whether it’s a new product, a change in your offering, or a community support program. From the very start—nearly 35 years ago!—Pacific Foods was led by its mission to coordinate with its local food bank, first by donating its own product and later growing this to encompass transforming surplus crops into products specifically for the Oregon Food Bank and paid-time for employees who volunteer to pack donated food boxes for community members. “Nourishment is at the heart of everything we do,” says Pacific’s Debra (Deb) Kaminski. “As a food business, it’s our mission to nourish everyone, whether through our products or through our actions.”
Collaborate
Once you’ve identified a key initiative that aligns with your business mission, it’s time to explore what options exist to get involved—but also to ask questions and listen carefully. You might have a great idea about how to solve a problem, but if you’re not working on it collaboratively with the community you’re hoping to positively impact, there’s a good chance you’re missing something important. Across all its community support projects, Pacific works to address clear needs of each community using the tools and resources it was best placed to provide. “We are always asking our communities—and ourselves—an important question,” shares Deb. “It’s very simple: How can we be the best partner?”
Return and Re-evaluate
As Pacific grew and developed its product offering, the coffee community stepped up in a big way in testing and trialing each new idea. “The coffee community was so generous with their time and their ideas,” says Deb. “As our business has grown, our investment in our communities has grown—it’s so important to us to return the generous support the coffee community gave us when we were first starting out.”
Over time, this philosophy—“the more we grow, the more we give”—has also created opportunities to reconsider that all important question above. A community’s needs can change quickly and significantly in the face of extenuating circumstances: Project Nourishment, a Pacific program that worked with local champions to help distribute supplies to coffee professionals significantly impacted by the pandemic, is a great example of Pacific redirecting its efforts to address a new circumstance for one of its key communities quickly and efficiently.
Deb has a word of advice for anyone thinking about building deeper connections with their community: “Don’t wait for another pandemic or emergency to start the work—you have to talk about mission and vision when it’s a good time, so that you’re ready and the views are aligned. For us, it was a matter of finding the right places to draw funding in to do these kinds of projects, so the earlier you make your plans, the more successful your programs will be!” ◇
For nearly 20 years, Pacific Foods has been producing Barista Series products for one group of people: baristas. You have been the inspiration for our entire line of plant-based beverages. We don’t exist without you. From conception to release,we don’t take a single step without asking you first. Because you don’t just inspire our products, you approve them. We are grateful for your support, and we promise to continue supporting you as you grow and develop in this very special community. Thank you for who you are and what you do. Barista Inspired. Barista Approved.®
We hope you are as excited as we are about the release of 25, Issue 15. Both the print edition and the availability of these features across sca.coffee/news wouldn’t have been possible without our generous underwriting sponsors for this issue: Pacific Barista Series, BWT water+more, and Breville. Thank you so much for your support! Learn more about our underwriters here.