Hampshire College

Dean Cycon is the owner of Dean’s Beans Organic Coffee Company, a certified 100 percent organic, fair trade, and kosher coffee roasting operation based in Orange, Massachusetts. Cycon has more than 25 years of development work and activism in indigenous communities, including coffee villages, around the world. Cycon is a co-founder of Coffee Kids, a nonprofit development group, and Cooperative Coffees, the world’s first fair trade roasters' cooperative.

Dean created Dean’s Beans to prove that business can promote positive economic, social, and environmental change at the developing nation source, and be profitable at the same time. Dean’s Beans has grown steadily over the past 11 years and has stayed on its mission. 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 the growers as a social equity premium. The company received a 2004 Best Practices Recognition from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 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 the Yale Law School. He has been a fellow at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a Senior Fulbright Scholar in New Zealand, and an Ella Baker Fellow and a Visiting Scholar at the Yale Law School. Cycon has taught environmental law, natural resource policy, and international resource management at the University of Massachusetts and the University of Rhode Island, and has several professional publications regarding law, development, resource management, and indigenous peoples. His book, Javatrekker: Dispatches from the World of Fair Trade Coffee, was released in October 2007.

Cycon also performs on stage and screen. He has been seen as Uncle Drosselmeyer in The Nutcracker ballet and in many other community theater productions. He played a sailor and a drunken pirate in Pirates of the Caribbean III.

 Cycon donates all speaking fees and royalties to progressive development projects with coffee communities.

• Keynote Speaker
• Tentative Schedule
• February Graduates