The Australian Barista School donates courses to a number of schools, organisations and charities in Brisbane and Sydney. These include charities such as Vision Australia and schools such as Normanhurst West Public School and Artarmon Public School.
We are also very excited about the Barista lending team we have started on Kiva. Kiva is an amazing non-profit website that gives you the chance to lend as little as $25 to a specific low-income entrepreneur in the developing world.
The people you see on Kiva's site are real individuals in need of funding - not marketing material. When you browse entrepreneurs' profiles on the site, choose someone to lend to, and then make a loan, you are helping a real person make great strides towards economic independence and improve life for themselves, their family, and their community. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates and track repayments. Then, when you get your loan money back, you can relend to someone else in need.
Once you’re a part of our team, you can choose to have a future loan on Kiva ‘count’ towards our team’s impact. The loan is still yours, and repayments still come to you - but you can also choose to have the loan show up in our team’s collective portfolio, so our team’s overall impact will grow!
We love the idea of Kiva because we are entrepreneurs and we are helping other entrepreneurs who have shown initative to have a go! More importantly, we get to help out entrepreneurs in countries that the coffee we drink comes from.