Each month for the foreseeable future, we are collecting donations to send to charitable organizations and causes in the US. For 2020, these highlighted organizations are ones that are centered around education and the fight against racism. It is clear that the specialty coffee industry, and society as a whole, has much to address regarding this long-standing issue. And a way to start is to contribute to those groups that are knowledgeable about action and teaching those around them to unlearn racism.
For the month of September, we will be collecting for Black Women’s Blueprint. This will continue until the last day of the month.
The organization’s main focuses center around envisioning “a world where women and girls of African descent are fully empowered and where gender, race, and other disparities are erased.” They are committed to placing these women and girls “within the context of the larger racial justice concerns of Black communities.”
To donate, you can select the amount you wish to contribute as an add-on for your product purchases. Acaia will publicly provide proof of donations when they are sent to the organization.
In their own words:
“Black Women’s Blueprint is a transnational Black feminist organization which celebrates and seizes the opportunities of the African diaspora, all while mourning of the violent conditions that created it. Initially borne of the slave trade and the Middle Passage, and expanded by contemporary crisis on, and migration from, the African continent, the diaspora contains multitudes of individual testimonies which, when united, derive our true power as Black women.
Our work merges transnational feminism of the global South with an American Black feminist ethos of intersectionality knowing that, at different turns, each of us may rise and fall with great (un)privilege. In some moments, something about us might give us greater access than our sister. In those same moments, we remember how important it is to be our sister’s keeper - across borders, across difference, across generations.
Black Women’s Blueprint tells the world: Black women are not a monolith, but we are a movement.”