In order to give back to those who make Marley Coffee possible, and to take responsibility for building healthy, happy communities, Marley Coffee founded the Marley Coffee Foundation. The Foundation aims to provide playable soccer fields and soccer camps to children of the coffee producing communities around the world. A percentage of sales from all Marley Coffee products sold goes to the Foundation to improve the conditions and opportunities for those who make our products possible.

Some background on why we chose this plight as our very personal cause. In the summer of 2001, after it came to the public’s attention on the use of child labor, the coffee industry leapt to evaluate its own vulnerability to this controversial issue.

Marley Coffee believes the proper place for a child is in the schoolroom, not the workplace. Even so, the International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that there are 250 million working children, 120 million of whom work full time. Especially in agricultural communities, children often must work in order to help their families survive. In agriculture, many children work for commercial farms and plantations that produce commodities exclusively for export, making up an estimated 7-12% of the work force on these plantations. Among the products that children help to harvest are cocoa, coffee, coconuts, cotton, fruit and vegetables, jasmine, palm oil, rubber, sisal, sugar cane, tea, tobacco, and vanilla.

Marley Coffee supervises and inspects its organic farms and oversees the payroll for its coffee farmers. Thus ensuring no children are present or involved with our growing, harvesting or shipment of coffee beans.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, more children work in agriculture around the world than any other economic sector – Marley Coffee is changing this statistic one bag at a time.