Celebrating Co-op and Fairtrade Month
Every October, two movements rooted in collective action come into focus: Fairtrade Month and Co-op Month. At Gimme, their overlap gives us a chance to reflect on what people can accomplish when they organize around shared values.
Across coffee-growing communities and right here at home, cooperation creates more equitable ways of working, doing business, and building for the future. That means stronger communities, greater economic agency, and a deeper sense of shared responsibility.
Víctor William Torres Estela, agricultural technician, walks through the plant nursery of the Sol y Café cooperative in Peru
Fairtrade: Building Equity at the Source
Around the world, smallholder farmers grow many of the everyday essentials that fuel our lives, including coffee, cocoa, bananas, and sugar. These products move through global trade systems shaped by generations of economic and political inequality, leaving many producers with limited power over the prices they receive and the conditions in which they work.
Fairtrade offers one way to shift that balance. Fairtrade standards include minimum prices and additional premiums that cooperatives can invest according to their own priorities. Those investments can support agricultural improvements, processing facilities, education, health care, climate resilience, and other projects that strengthen farming communities.
In 2025, our green coffee purchases at Gimme generated $51,835 in Fairtrade Premiums through the sale of 117,350 kilograms (more than 129 tons) of coffee. Since becoming a Fairtrade partner, we’ve collectively generated more than $213,000 in lifetime Fairtrade Premiums for farmers worldwide.
Those numbers represent more than money moving through a supply chain. They represent cooperatives making decisions about what their communities need and putting resources toward stronger, more resilient futures.
Every purchase is one small part of that larger system. When thousands of people make those choices together, the impact adds up.
Cooperatives: Shared Ownership, Shared Future
At Gimme, we practice another form of collective action through our cooperative model.
Founded in 2000 and re-established in 2022 as an employee-owned cooperative, Gimme gives employees the opportunity to become owners by meeting membership criteria and purchasing an equity share. Employee-owners have one vote and one voice in the cooperative, along with the opportunity to receive patronage dividends when profits allow.
Our democratic structure extends beyond ownership. Board members are elected by their peers, and employees contribute to committees and other efforts that help shape the business. The people who roast the coffee, serve it to our communities, support our wholesale partners, and keep everything running each day have a direct role in determining where we go next.
That spirit is reflected in one of our values: We / Us / Our. We see Gimme as a community of communities, connected by the work we do and the people we do it with. Shared ownership brings plenty of responsibility, but it also brings plenty of reasons to celebrate. And, fortunately, we have a pretty good time doing it.
The coffee nursery of the CAFICO cooperative in Honduras holds 280,000 young coffee trees of certified genetic purity and of six varieties that are resistant to diseases that have prospered with climate change, and that adapt to different terrains.
Facing Market Challenges with Hope
Coffee is deeply connected to forces far beyond the farm or the café. Climate instability, changing market conditions, and tariffs have created significant challenges across the coffee supply chain, contributing to historically high prices and uncertainty for producers, businesses, and consumers alike.
In moments like these, the structures we build together matter.
Fairtrade provides tools intended to help farmers navigate market volatility, including minimum pricing and premiums for community investment. Cooperatives give producers greater collective bargaining power and a way to pool resources, knowledge, and decision-making. Here at Gimme, employee ownership gives our workers a shared stake in navigating uncertainty and shaping the future of the business.
None of these structures can remove the challenges facing coffee. They can, however, give people more resources and more agency for meeting them.
That’s where hope comes from for us. Our customers, wholesale partners, producers, and fellow cooperators are all part of a much larger network of people working to build more equitable and sustainable ways of doing business.
Why October Matters
Fairtrade Month and Co-op Month share a simple idea: people have more power when they work together.
Farmers can organize through cooperatives to strengthen their position in global markets. Workers can become owners and have a say in the businesses they help build. Communities can pool resources to address the challenges they face and invest in the futures they want.
That connection is worth celebrating, especially in a coffee industry where every cup depends on an enormous network of people.
From smallholder farmers in coffee-growing regions to baristas and roasters in Ithaca, our work is connected. The coffee we share carries with it the choices made by producers, cooperatives, workers, businesses, and customers along the way.
This October, we’re raising a cup to all of them, and to the communities near and far that make good coffee possible.
