News

UN award for fair trade coffee company

08.03.2013

Mountain Partnership member Dean’s Beans Organic Coffee has received a United Nations award for empowering coffee-growers, primarily women, to improve their lives and their children’s futures.

The American fair trade company and founder and CEO Dean Cycon were recognized with a Women’s Empowerment Principles Leadership Award in Community Engagement for a record of innovative social and market-based approaches to realizing gender equity in coffee-growing regions.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Michelle Bachelet, Executive Director of UN Women, presided over a ceremony for the award winners in New York on 6 March attended by 250 business leaders and representatives from civil society, governments and the UN.

“Strong source communities are vital to our business, and women are the foundations of those communities,” Cynon said in his acceptance speech.

Women’s Empowerment Principles is a partnership of UN Women and the UN Global Compact which provides a roadmap for business to empower women in the workplace, marketplace and community.

Dean’s Beans was created 20 years ago to model how business could be a force for positive social change in coffee growing communities and still be profitable.  The company works in 12 countries importing fair trade organic coffee and cocoa and has a profit sharing program with all employees and all farmer cooperatives it works with.

Read the official press release and find out more about Dean’s Beans.