A British charity that helps African communities by providing them with livestock and agricultural training has partnered with Starbucks in the UK to launch a nationwide fundraising campaign, as it seeks to support smallholder farmers in rural Rwanda.
Send a Cow’s Big Cow Project will take place throughout October, with nearly 700 Starbucks stores across the UK competing to raise funds of £650 – the cost of sending a single dairy cow to a community in the landlocked African country.
The Big Cow Project is the brainchild of Bolton-based Starbucks barista Aaron Swift, who originally launched the campaign last year following a Starbucks-funded trip to see coffee farmers in Rwanda. In 2014, he recruited 50 Starbucks stores across the North West of England for the project, and together they successfully raised the equivalent of 11 dairy cows for Send a Cow. Inspired by its success and the level of enthusiasm and support that staff showed, The Big Cow Project is expanding to take place across hundreds of Starbucks stores nationally this month.
Swift said: “I saw how these cows help improve coffee productivity: they provide organic fertiliser, improve household income and nutrition from the milk they produce, and they reconcile community relationships. These cows really are changing lives.”
This is the first time that The Big Cow Project has been rolled out nationwide, and all of the money raised throughout the month will be doubled by the government as part of UK Aid Match funding, which Send a Cow has secured until the end of the year.
Send a Cow chief executive Simon Barnes said: ‘‘Aaron’s initiative is a wonderful example of how a small idea and a grassroots campaign can develop into a massive fundraising opportunity which will directly help hundreds of Rwanda’s poorest families. It’s incredibly inspiring and we’re extremely grateful to Aaron and his colleagues at Starbucks for rallying behind it. The added bonus is that all of their efforts and their customers’ donations will be doubled by the government as part of the UK Aid Match funding, which means we will be able to help even more of Africa’s poorest people. We’re expecting to see some pretty wacky fundraising activities over the next month, so I’m sure there’ll be lots of fun ways for people to get involved.’’
UK-based Send a Cow has been working with some of Africa’s poorest families for nearly 30 years and has helped over a million people work their way out of extreme poverty. It provides livestock, including cows, tools, seeds and training, as part of a comprehensive programme designed to give people the hope and the means to establish a future for themselves, their families and their communities.
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