Newcastle-based community benefit society Shared Interest has been helping cooperatives and sustainable producers across the world for over 35 years. They have supported millions of people with limited income to grow their businesses and earn a fair living. Here are some of the great things they have been doing recently.
Trading knowledge for independence
In Peru Shared Interest are working with an organisation, helping coffee growing communities to build lasting independence. Perunor was established in 1998 and the organisation works with groups of farmers to cultivate and then commercialise specialty coffee. It also equips them with the skills, tools and certifications which they need to help them have a better position in the market. Its approach is said to be centred on “empowerment through trade”.
Since Shared Interest first provided finance “the number of organisations Perunor supports has risen from 5 to 16 reaching over 2,500 families”. This means that these families and the coffee growers they work with have access to things like government programmes and partnerships, which can help them to better cultivate and commercialise the coffee growing.
Enriching Rwandan farmers through ethical finance
In a similar way, Shared Interest has also been helping Rwandan coffee farmers through their ethical finance to build greater independence. Rwanda is said to be a vibrant nation, defined by its rich biodiversity and also its resilience, a country where around three-quarters of the 11 million inhabitants live in rural areas with as many as 90% dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods. Among these, an estimated 400,000 people in Rwanda grow coffee on small farms as the terrain, the altitude and the climate are ideal for coffee growing.
The coffee growers organise themselves into small cooperatives and share services of centralised washing stations while prioritising the production of speciality Arabica coffee varieties. One of the groups of coffee makers is the cooperative Simbi Coffee and they have been helped by Shared Interest since 2021 helping to strengthen their access to finance.
Simbi’s export credit facility with Shared Interest has been used to improve its operation and processing capacity, improving its service for its growing number of customers.
Trade built on respect
Meanwhile, help is also provided for farmers in Ecuador. Food engineer Tomas Landazuri has been pursuing a vision of building a vital bridge between small farmers there and ethical consumers in Europe.
In founding SolAlter Landazuri has been able to create from his workshop in the South of France, a trade model based on fairness, quality and above all respect. He is being supported in his work by Shared Interest.
Shared Interest have been able to help Landazuri engage in fairtrade. Landazuri said: “in the future SolAlter will continue buying these products from the same organisations since it is important to them to have regular customers which they can count on”.
The support that Shared Interest gives to Landazuri and SolAlter is their reminder that when finance is used fairly and ethically it can help people “turn opportunity into stability and partnership into progress”.
A hand up for Handicraft producers
Ten Thousand Villages (TTV) was established in 1946 as one of the world’s very first fair trade organisations and to this day, it is still a pioneering ethical retailer of products which are traded fairly it connects 10,000 artisans in 24 countries across Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa to consumers in the US and Canada,
Shared Interest has been supporting TTV from as long ago as 1998 and that relationship has been key to the sustainability of the ethical payment model enacted by TTV founder Edna Ruth Byer. They use Shared Interest’s finance as a way to facilitate payments to artists and farmers.
The power of ethical finance
Yet again Shared Interest has shown the power of ethical finance to make a real difference in hard-working people’s lives across the world. Their investments continue to help farmers and artisans in developing countries to build their businesses in sustainable, cooperative ways and provide resources for consumers and customers all over the globe.
It can be a matter of great pride on Tyneside that this organisation is based in Newcastle and is reaching out across the world to help so many people and do so much good work.
You can learn more about Shared Interest, and how you can invest with them to help sustainable cooperatives gain the finance they need, here.
