Our Impact
GOOD THINGS happen when we work together!
OPTIMISM EXCHANGE PROGRAM
We’re on a mission to provide Daily Happy to every community we work with. Click here to find out about our current campaign in Laos.
Optimism Exchange is our Social Community Development program across Asia, aimed at creating positive impact. It begins directly with our farming partners but has a wider ripple effect across the communities they call home.
As part of our Social Impact commitment, we are passionately committed to helping provide Daily Happy across every community we work with. This means actively listening to each farmer’s needs as identified by them, not by us. We always listen to the community to determine the project, as each place has specific and vital needs.
At OQ we commit to these projects ourselves, but we couldn’t do it without our coffee-loving Australian community who play a crucial role in delivering positivity back to the communities that grow their cup of Daily Happy. Team effort!
In Sumatra, we've been working with an inspiring female-led co-op for the past 4 years. Totally inspirational! In 2019 we were lucky enough to visit them in person and were blown away by their work ethic. Although life has improved dramatically for the members of the co-op over the last decade, many of the wonderful people who grow our favourite coffees were still putting their livelihoods at risk to sell their coffee because of poor roads infrastructure.
During harvest season it rains a lot and the narrow, steep dirt tracks to town and the coffee processing facility become extremely dangerous to travel on, particularly when loaded with 60kg sacks of coffee! At times when the weather was particularly bad, the farmers couldn’t use the roads at all; coffee needs to be processed soon after it's harvested so when the farmers couldn't travel to town and access the processing facility it often meant the coffee was unusable and their total annual income was lost overnight!
Our contribution went towards paving 500 metres of dirt road for 8 different villages to change the daily lives of more than 1000 households! The truly exciting thing is that it wasn't just the farmers who benefitted. Everyone now has access to safe travel all year round to shop, go to school and do business. That's what we call Daily Happy!
REBUILD LANGBIANG
Lang Biang Coffee Village are a 100% farmer owned co-operative of the K'Ho people in Vietnam. And they are super-close to our hearts as we’ve worked closely with them since early 2017 when we imported our very first coffee from them. It’s a delicious specialty grade arabica grown in the beautiful central highlands of which we still offer today
With the help of our customers, we joined a collective effort to raise funds to help our partners and their village rebuild. They rebuilt their homes and this story of tragedy and loss turned into one of hope and new beginnings. One year to the day in 2019, we had the privilege of visiting Pay and Tam and the whole village for New Years Day celebration at their home. Boy, did we do some celebrating!
Working closely with the people who grow our coffee allows us to understand their unique situation and how we can work together to improve it. Our friends and farming partners, Tam and Pat desperately needed a new processing area and equipment. But with no access to banking or credit facilities it wasn’t possible for them to get the finances they needed. For many of us the idea of not having a bank account seems outrageous but for many farmers and people across the world this is their reality.
So we stepped up to help. Together with our community of coffee-lovers, who know and love the coffee produced by Pat and Tam, we were able to raise enough money for them to invest in the processing equipment they needed. After all, with just a little help from us they were all set up to Deliver the Daily Happy we so love and value. Now that really is a Fair Value Exchange.
