hex-is-gone asked:
Are you John Green or a Company? or both?!
It really is true that you never know what someone’s going through. We must be careful and kind to each other. We must begin from a place of generosity and not contempt. But that’s so hard!
And it is SO EASY for me to two-dimensionalize someone on the Internet. I’m not sure if this is the result of my personal character flaws or the architecture of social internet spaces (or both), but I am really troubled by it.
So yeah, you never know what other people are going through. You may not even fully understand what YOU are going through. I know I don’t. The only thing I know for sure is that if you’re going through coffee too quickly, I have a great solution for you–ethically sourced, astonishingly delicious coffee that arrives at your house on a regular schedule so that you never run out of coffee.
Artificial Intelligence is coming for my unpaid internship.
Look what people can accomplish when they work in real solidarity and partnership with each other. Incredible.
(In the picture above, Henry is at the far right, along with other survivors of MDR-TB and me, author and unpaid coffee company intern.)
Greetings from Sierra Leone. In 2019, I visited a tuberculosis hospital here and met a kid named Henry. He was very sick but also full of joy. He’d already been at the hospital for months, and his TB was not responding to treatment. He was 16, but looked no older than my nine-year-old son Henry.
Lakka Government Hospital is the best place in SL to receive treatment for drug resistant TB, but it is still dramatically underfunded. Especially back then, the newest and best treatments were simply unavailable, and many patients died as a result.
Over the next three years, Henry got so sick. Standard second-line treatment failed. He was a patient at the hospital for over THREE YEARS. He was such a special kid–one of his doctors referred to him “as the one who helps others”–and the staff was heartbroken as they watched him get sicker.
But then, through support from Partners in Health and Sierra Leone’s Ministry of Health, Henry became the first person in Sierra Leone to be treated with the newest and best combination of drugs for his TB.
He survived. He is cured.
I saw him today. I wept. He is in his first semester of university now. When I asked him how he was doing, he said, “So great.”
People ask me why I am so fixated upon TB and furious about it.
It’s because of Henry.
According to the U.S. Supreme Court, I am actually TWO PEOPLE–one a human being endowed with a soul called John Green, and the other a corporation that gives its profit to charity called the Awesome Coffee Club.
Both these people have equal rights before the law, except that the corporate person can’t commit assault or go to jail or be killed by the state, whereas the non-corporate person can be all of those things.
It’s fun! It’s a great system! Buy our coffee!
I may be an unpaid intern, but I am also an absolute fucking meme lord.
The Awesome Coffee Club now has backyard compostable k-cups as well as whole bean and ground coffee. We are your one-stop shop for all your coffee needs.
And unlike the coffee you currently drink, our profit doesn’t go toward making Howard Schultz richer and better-equipped to bust unions. It goes to expand access to healthcare for pregnant people and kids. Drink better coffee that you can feel better about.
jonberry555 asked:
What's better, TB awareness or ethically sourced coffee?
I am a very, very big fan of our coffee, but…
If everyone in wealthy countries understood that TB has killed FORTY MILLION PEOPLE since the year 2000, and if everyone in wealthy countries was angry and disgusted by the ongoing horror of underfunded research and treatment distribution, then TB death rates would decline by 60 or 70% over the next decade, simply because more resources would be devoted to finding new treatments and effectively distributing current ones. (We’ve seen this happen before! Look at HIV/AIDS death between 2005 and 2015! They fell by over 50%, not primarily because of new treatments but because of a dramatic expansion of existing treatments. Same thing could happen with TB.)
Like, we might lose 20 million people in the 2030s to TB, not because it’s an impossible problem to solve but because we do not treat the problems of impoverished communities the way we treat the problems of rich communities.
So yeah, TB awareness (and activism! and fundraising! and advocacy for patients!) is vastly, vastly more important than the world’s best coffee.
vwampires asked:
what's your favourite taste
Not sure how many times I have to say coffee. It’s coffee, especially coffee that donates 100% of its profit to charity.
The socks and coffee clubs have donated over $2,000,000 to support a stronger healthcare system in Sierra Leone. Who could imagine a better taste than the world’s best coffee supporting broader access to healthcare?
empath-demon asked:
Welcome back to tumblr! In the post on Friday that linked to your interview about Awesome Coffee, you said that k-cups are coming soon. If you don’t mind me asking, what was the reasoning behind adding k-cups to the product lineup? Everything else seems environmentally friendly so I found it odd, so now I’m curious.
This is a great question. I don’t know how to make my answer any shorter than this.
K-Cups ARE bad for the environment–not only because they contain plastic, but also because even thoughtfully farmed coffee has negative impacts on certain ecosystems, which is a very high cost for something that isn’t necessity for human existence.
Anything that is a luxury for humans, from chocolate to books, has costs that are paid by the Earth and its inhabitants in exchange for things we don’t actually need. Luxuries costs carbon. They cost land. They cost biodiversity. They may also, even if unintentionally, perpetuate and empower unjust systems of resource distribution. I think being aware of these costs is essential.
Luxuries also have benefits, of course. I am a big fan of books and chocolate (and coffee); they bring me joy. Coffee, at least when collectives are well-organized are paid directly, is also good for coffee farmers and the communities where they work.
The Awesome Coffee Club does not seek to eliminate the costs associated with consumption, because I don’t believe they can be eliminated by selling coffee. Instead, the ACC seeks to DECREASE existing costs to biodiversity and systems of injustice. We do this by trying to reduce harm. In the case of our coffee beans, this means paying farmers directly and supporting collectives that are actively working to reverse deforestation. In the case of our packaging, this means packaging that keeps our coffee fresh while also being biodegradable. And in the case of our profit, that means investing all of it into healthcare systems in the world’s poorest communities.
Unfortunately, around 30% of all coffee consumed in the United States is consumed via K-Cup. Many K-Cup manufacturers have no real interest in their costs to the environment. They may claim to be “recyclable,” but this implies that they are commonly recycled, which they aren’t. We have waited to make K-Cups because we wanted to understand what would actually reduce environmental harm in the K-Cup market, and we think we’ve found a K-Cup partner that reduces–but does not eliminate–the harm that comes from K-Cups by producing backyard compostable K-Cups. That is to say, these K-Cups do not need to be shipped to an industrial composting or recycling facility in order to be reused; they will break down in a backyard composting environment.
We think that offices (and it is mostly offices) that currently use K-Cups will serve the world and their workers better by switching to Awesome Coffee Club K-Cups. But to be clear, if you do not use K-Cups to drink coffee, you should not start. And if you do use K-Cups to drink coffee, you should switch to a whole bean or ground solution if it’s practical for you to do so. But if you are married to K-Cups, we want to reduce the harm they cause.