Monday, April 28, 2008

20th Anniversary Reflections: David Abedon

In this entry, David Abedon, co-founder of Coffee Kids, chronicles the genesis of the organization when he helped Bill Fishbein plan his trip to Guatemala to visit coffee-farming families in the late ‘80s. Abedon is a professor in the Natural Resources Science Department in the College of Environmental and Life Sciences at the University of Rhode Island. He currently serves on Coffee Kids board of directors.

“In the 80s I applied for a sabbatical leave from URI and stayed at Brown University in the School for Portuguese and Brazilian Studies.

“In order to get to Brown, I would walk from my house through Wickendon Street to the east side of Providence to Brown. I would stop at Bill’s store, the Coffee Exchange, for some muffins on my way to work and on my way back and that’s when we started to discuss coffee and poverty.

“So when Bill told me he was going down to Guatemala, I said, ‘What are you going to do when you get there? Who are you going to see?’ And Bill said, ‘Well, I don’t know. I just have to go.’
“So we looked at the schedule and started to set things up.
“I called up Partners for the Americas and Bill and I figured out a way for him to visit some of these coffee regions and so he came back and said, ‘We gotta’ do something.’

“I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘I don’t know, what?’

“Sometime along when we were starting to figure things out and we’d started to do some fundraisers, I invited Dean Cycon and he and Bill hit it off and Coffee Kids mushroomed from there.”

For more information on the history of Coffee Kids, download our latest newsletter (PDF 1.9MB).