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More commencment information.

Dean Cycon, owner of Dean’s Beans Organic Coffee Company and the author of Javatrekker: Dispatches from the World of Fair Trade Coffee, will speak at Hampshire College’s commencement on May 17 at 11 a.m. on the Harold F. Johnson Library Lawn.

Cycon has more than 25 years of development work and activism in indigenous communities, including coffee villages around the world.

He created Dean’s Beans—a certified 100 percent organic, fair trade, and kosher coffee roasting operation based in Orange, Massachusetts—to prove that business can promote positive economic, social, and environmental change at the third world source and be profitable at the same time. The company designs and funds people-centered development projects in the coffee lands in partnership with the growers, and returns a percentage of profits to growers as a Social Equity Premium.

Dean’s Beans received a Best Practices Recognition from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in 2004, and the 2005 Sustainability Award from the Specialty Coffee Association of America.

Cycon has a law degree from New York Law School and an advanced law degree from Yale Law School. He has been a Fellow at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a Senior Fulbright Scholar in New Zealand, an Ella Baker Fellow, and a visiting scholar at Yale Law School.

Hampshire and Dean’s Beans to direct funds to Guatemalan girls' scholarship aid

Dean Cycon is donating his speaker honorarium to CHICA! (Comunidade de Hermanas Inteligentes con Corazones Abiertas, or Community of Intelligent Sisters with Open Hearts).  Additionally, Hampshire College is donating 100 percent of the proceeds from sales of its Dean’s Beans Fair-Well Blend commencement coffee to CHICA.

CHICA! is a Guatemalan girls’ empowerment organization founded by three Amherst High School students in partnership with Dean’s Beans and APROS (Associacion de Promotores de Salud) in San Pedro La Laguna, Guatemala. APROS is a grassroots women’s health organization founded by Guatemalan women from rural coffee villages with technical and financial assistance from Dean’s Beans.   

 

• Javatrekker Dean Cycon to Speak at Commencement