Trade After Aid - Indonesia: Coffee Kids supports rebuilding of coffee farmers community

Sustain Sumatra is a new program for building sustainable trade and directly helping those whose lives were devastated by the Tsunami. It was formed in September 2005 as a coalition of Indonesian, American and European partners.

Coffee Kids partners with private sector to rebuild coffee farmers' community in Indonesia Whole latte love and Reliefweb

In late April 2005, the Aceh Tsunami Relief Fund, established by the NGO Coffee Kids, in partnership with the corporation ForesTrade Inc., began a project to support the reconstruction of local community infrastructure in the coffee-growing Gayo Highland region in Central Aceh, Indonesia.

The fund is rehabilitating 10 coffee processing facilitites, restoring 10 hectares of coffee farms with soil erosion losses, and reconstructing 15 mosques. ForesTrade has formed an alliance with two U.S. non-profit organisations – Coffee Kids and Counterpart International – and the American Indonesian Chamber of Commerce to carry out and expand the work of the Aceh Tsunami Relief Project. ForesTrade co-founder Thomas Fricke has initiated a mass consumer marketing initiative in the United States called Sustain Sumatra in partnership with Counterpart International (CPI), a Washington-DC based humanitarian assistance non-profit organization and the American Indonesian Chamber of Commerce (AICC).

The coffee aspects of the Sustain Sumatra campaign is undoubtedly a major component, and will continue to be primarily channeled through current Aceh Tsunami Relief partners PPKGO and Trimaju. The program has been accessed starting June 17th 2005 at a dedicated website (www.sustainsumatra.org) designed for the use by a broad assortment of partner companies, customers, and consumers. This website also links back to the Coffee Kids Website to direct potential individual and corporate contributors towards Coffee Kids’s ongoing support for Sumatra and their broader global efforts.