Resistance Coffee has for five years brought some of the finest fair trade organic coffee to Chicago, and raised funds for organizations ranging from Radios Populares, to the Latino Union, to the Chicago Women’s Health Center.

Resistance Coffee started out roasting beans from Zapatista communities in resistance in Chiapas, but supplies got thin, so with great support from friends at Just Coffee up in Madison, we’ve landed on roasting the beans grown by the women of La FEM cooperative in Nicaragua for the past two years. If you’ve had this coffee, you know its quality, and supporting La FEM also means supporting Nicaraguan women’s ability to acquire and own land and thus take fuller control over their fates.

Over the years, Resistance Coffee has grown slowly but steadily, and the time has come to expand this endeavor. The first step in this direction has been to formulate what is tentatively titled the “Chicago Coffee Confederation.” 

The model takes the basic small-scale process used by Resistance Coffee, and rather than forming a business that centralizes roasting, marketing, and delivery, instead seeks to decentralize those parts of the process that do not need centralizing. We are able to get bulk delivery of beans together, but then each project replicates the very inexpensive Bean Boss roaster, develops its own markets, and raises funds for its own projects. 

The basic roaster can be assembled for less than a couple hundred dollars, thus making it a tool accessible to many people, from low-income activists to musicians and artists and poor people. A second roaster has been operating now for several months, and while there have been a few kinks to work out, musician Michael McSherry has very quickly learned the trade, and applied it in a very different yet complimentary way to the way that Resistance Coffee works. Future replicants are in the works with AREA Chicago magazine, potentially with Ciclo Urbano, God’s Gang, the Cob Connection, and on.

You can learn more about our burgeoning work at chicagocoffeeconfederation.wordpress.com.

Solidarity, David