Hi. This is Paul Zellizer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help you increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps more people learn how to have positive impact through values based business. Thank you so much. Today, I'm thrilled to introduce you to David Gaines and our topic today is radical business.

David is the CEO and chief visionary for La Terreza Coffee and the author of the newly released book Radical Business, The Root of Your Work and How It Can Change the World. I'm also honored to say David interviewed me in October of last year for the Social Enterprise Alliance podcast when he was just recently stepped down from being board chair after a long term there, and we also got to connect in person when David was recently here in Albuquerque for an event called creating a community of business for good, which David was the key speaker and organizer and helped us connect with each other in just a beautiful way. David, welcome to the show. Yeah. Thank you, Paul.

It's such a pleasure to be here.

It's great to be here, and thanks for all the great work that you've done. I'm excited to introduce you to our listeners. But to wind back a little bit, David, give us a little bit your origin story as a social entrepreneur, not what's on the ground now, but how you got entrepreneur, not what's on the ground now, but, like, how you got started. Yeah. For sure. It's always an interesting question. You know,

it's such a foundational one too. But, you know, at the end of the day, I used to have a small business. Really, what I did for myself was create my own work so that I could volunteer how I wanted to to volunteer. And so I did that for a long time, but, eventually, what drew me in was to the world of coffee. So let let's hear the coffee is a coffee roasting business that I own in Cincinnati, Ohio, and coffee is just really a fantastic way to have a business that has social impact in so many different ways. I think many coffee roasters today have these origin stories of who is the farmer or what how do we have a living wage? What's the next step beyond, like, fair trade? But what's really that relationship look like? What does what's needed in the local communities around the world that are producing coffee? So you have that aspect, and there are so many coffee roasters that are keyed into that. But coffee as itself is just this connecting drink, you know, and we our our DNA as a business is how do we supply independent coffee shops and really empower that local owner. Well, every one of those local owners, the reason why they start coffee is to better their community, to have deeper or more authentic conversations, to maybe even lower the political temperature in the room a little bit.

Like, we have so much in common, but we have lost the art of dialogue, and so that's usually the heart of why people start a coffee shop in the first place. So there's this some there's just something magic about this beverage and the amount of social impact that it can have.

I can't remember which podcast it was. I'll see if I can track it down. But they were recently talking about it was a writer who was saying that the age of enlightenment, you know, like, coming out of the Middle Ages, which is a really tough time for humanity in many ways, that coffee and coffee houses in particular were key to the age of enlightenment, to like the beginnings of of trade and more robust thinking in new ways. And it was literally the there was the drink coffee, which does some super interesting things to our brain. I'm a I'm a, you know, neuro geek. So it's, like, very cool to see what coffee does to the brain. But it was the fact that there were these 3rd spaces in communities that, you know, wasn't home and it wasn't the church where Yeah. And those are both great things, but there was no other place for humans to really gather other than, like, a tavern and that has a different association.

Right? It was like Right. A place where you weren't trying to kinda check out at the end of your week or forget your troubles, but or celebrate something that happened in your small world, but really to connect with other people in your community. Classic. Right?

Yeah.

Like, I've got about 5 emails in my inbox right now. Hey. We should go get a cup of coffee. Right?

That's right. That's exactly right.

And you stepped into there. One of the things I know about you, David, is one of your passions was wasn't just coffee as the drink and also the community part, but you have a particular passion for women's entrepreneurship and women growers of coffees. Tell us a little bit about that.