March Madness: Help CRS (and the farmers we serve) score a big win!
A big thank you to everyone that voted in the first round of the Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Challenge! Thanks to your votes we’ve advanced to the second round and are even closer to winning $200,000 to help coffee farmers respond to the effects of climate change.
Below you’ll find all the details of our proposal and the voting process. We’ll be sending this out to our CRS network and please send it out to yours. Don’t forget to take a moment to vote for our proposal by this Friday, April 3!
Here’s a note from our colleagues in Latin America. Please note that voting ends Friday.
Great news! Our proposal to help family coffee farmers in Latin America adapt to climate change has been selected as a finalist in the Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Climate Challenge! Since Green Mountain is awarding grants in four categories, I guess you could say we have made the Final Four!
Many thanks to all those who voted to support our project concept during the first round of voting. Now we are on to the second round, and you have only until Friday, April 3, to vote to make it a winner!
The Issue.
Climate change is changing the face of agriculture all over the planet. Since a specific crop can only thrive under certain environmental conditions, the increases in average temperatures and the radical changes in rainfall are changing our understanding of what can grow well where—what we call “land-use patterns.” The outlook for coffee farmers in Mexico and Central America is pretty grim. Under some scenarios, coffee could disappear altogether from some of the leading coffee-growing regions in Central America in the next generation or so.
The Proposal.
We have been invited by our friends at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Colombia to partner to help small-scale family farmers adapt to these changes. We will help CIAT gather data from some of the more than 7000 farmers who are participating in our CAFE Livelihoods project in Mexico and Central America. CIAT will use that data to support its very fancy “crop targeting” models that help show land-use patterns will likely change over time in the places where we are working. Together, we will share that information with farmers and help them make better decisions about how they will farm into the future.
The Process.
Green Mountain has developed a creative two-tier system for this particular version of March Madness. On one level, the company has invited folks like you all around the world to vote for the proposals you like best at JustMeans. That process ends on April 3. On another level, Green Mountain has assembled a team from within its company to review the proposals and vote (kind of like the popular vote and the electoral college). Once the votes are in, Green Mountains “electors” will take them and the proposals into consideration and announce a winner on Earth Day, April 22.
What You Can Do.
Log on and vote! Ask your friends and families and neighbors to do the same! (FYI,you will need to register with JustMeans in order to vote.)
Tags: climate change, Coffee
