By Andrew Bounds, North of England Correspondent

A partnership between a Church of England vicar, refugee leaders, a local authority and a commercially-driven coffee company is providing a new model for helping migrants leave benefits and integrate into their new communities.

Refugees from the Oromo tribe in Ethiopia – now living in the UK – are launching their own brand of Fair Trade-supported coffee on Thursday at a Westminster event hosted by James Purnell, welfare secretary.

Ian Agnew of the Lorna Young Foundation, a charity that helped set up the not-for-profit Oromo Coffee Company and find business backing for it, said: “It is about enterprise, showing that refugees are not scroungers.”

It is also about giving control over more of the supply chain to coffee producers, he said. Ethiopian coffee, though some of the world’s best, is usually sold cheap to middlemen and the big profits are made by roasters and sellers in the west.

OCC uses instead Fair Trade-certified organic beans sourced from the homeland and bought at minimum prices.

Around 250 Oromo families arrived in Greater Manchester between 2006 and 2008 from Kenyan camps under a United Nations resettlement plan. Some clustered in Stalybridge and Ashton-under-Lyne and took English lessons provided by local churches.

Abiyot Kebede Shiferani, now OCC company secretary, said: “We wanted to improve our life. We were not satisfied with depending on benefits.”

The Rev Ian Stubbs, vicar of St George’s church, Stalybridge, put them in touch with the Lorna Young Foundation and local authorities.

Tameside council then offered business mentoring and facilities to the company and introduced them to local entrepreneurs.

“There’s been very little cash but around £20,000 ($30,283) of start-up costs given in kind,” said Joan Ryan, a business mentor provided by the council. Asone, a local design agency, created a packet and logo for free, using Oromo symbols.

The tribe claims to number around 30m and occupy much of eastern and southern Ethiopia, but hundreds of thousands have fled past clashes between the Oromo Liberation Front, which wants independence, and government troops.

Teshome Bedassa, the company accountant, said working with coffee offered a connection with home. “Life is very different here. It is difficult to live in a new country. Coffee is our life. Whenever there is a gathering, coffee is there.”

A £5,000 grant from the Church Urban Fund has just come through, which will help equip an office for four staff. There will be around a dozen volunteer salespeople and a seven-strong board.

Ethiopia is the original home of the bean that spread across the world and it is roasted and packed by Bolling Coffee, just across the Pennines in Meltham, which produces for Fortnum & Mason, the upmarket department store, as well as its Grumpy Mule brand.

It already bought beans from the Oromia Coffee Farmers Co-operative Union and is now sourcing more for the OCC. The co-op featured in Black Gold, a popular documentary about the injustices of the trade.

Ian Balmforth, managing director of the family-owned Bolling, said: “We are launching this exactly as if it was our own product. We demanded higher quality than they would have done. The challenge is to sell it not just on the story but on its quality.”

He believes it will retail for around £4 a bag of beans or roast. There are three organic varieties from different areas of Ethiopia. “We are giving them a lot of help now but one day hope to be just a supplier to them.”

Mr Purnell, whose constituency is in Stalybridge, has supported the Fair Trade business model as a means of enabling refugees to work for themselves and to improve the lot of poor farmers.

As well as targeting community groups and independent shops, the company hopes to enlist business customers who have corporate social responsibility goals. “They can meet some CSR targets just by changing their coffee,” Mr Agnew said.
 

- Financial Times