Our Approach to Scaling Care Trade

“How will you scale?”

This is one of the scariest questions one can ask a social entrepreneur early in their journey. As a start-up, our focus is on ensuring our boat does not capsize. You want to be able to prototype your ideas and test your assumptions and the thought of scaling or the process of increasing a social enterprise’s social impact can completely disrupt the process.

Once an organization has achieved the “special sauce” — the model that works time and time again, the thought then becomes “how might we scale this to reach more people?”. As co-founders, this question has been at the forefront of our minds since 2019, when we felt that we achieved a special sauce with the Care Trade model that we hoped could be replicated.

However, we learned the process of scaling is not as simple as replicating the model in a new community. It requires a new form of prototyping. The goal is to find the most efficient approach to scale, while not burning the wallet of the organization. After considering to replicate the efforts of Bean Voyage in new countries and dissipating our learning through networks, we learned that the best approach for scale would be to use the affiliation model.

In short, the affiliation model combines the process of branching (opening new offices) and dissipating (sharing best practices in the sector) processes and finding a sweet balance. The organization does not need to start new branches of its offices around the world and it is still able to ensure the quality of its services is not compromised. Think of it as a process most similar to a Training of Trainer model.

In Bean Voyage’s approach to scale, we are closely affiliated with two groups: local organizations and community-based facilitators. By partnering with local organizations such as cooperatives and women’s associations, we can maximize our impact without having to build new offices and exhaust our resources. People often look at our humble budgets and ask- How are you managing to do what you do with so little?! We respond that we find the right community-based partner to collaborate with to reduce operational costs.

A photo from in-person training in Frailes / Credit: Marlies Gabriele Prinzl

So our other secret sauce ingredient is that we affiliate with community-based facilitators. Instead of recruiting trainers who may be subject matter experts but have limited community context, we hire local youth as facilitators. Over a period of 200+ hours, we train them on all of the key topics and provide them with the tools to be able to lead 40–50 producers each. In turn, the facilitators go into their own communities and lead the Care Training program. This not only allows us to scale drastically by increasing the number of local youth as facilitators, but it also generates local employment and creates energy around rural youth engaging in their own communities. Some of our facilitators have even moved on to start their own coffee-related ventures and used the skills they learned at Bean Voyage to contribute to their own communities.

Four years later, the question “how will you scale?” does not scare us anymore. Instead, we feel proud of the fact that we did not know the answer four years ago. The process of discovering our special sauce happened naturally, by working hand-in-hand with our producer partners who have been our biggest mentors in the process. And we learned to understand that it is also us that needs to define what the ‘scale’ looks like to us (a separate blog on that will have to come!).

From an event where smallholder producers shared their experiences with coffee drinkers in Costa Rica
Credit: Javier Sánchez Mora

It is also important for us to note that this process, however successful, would not have been possible without the trust of our earliest partners. From the first producer to trust us and guide us — Ericka Mora and her family to the funding partners Red Empress Foundation, Strachan Foundation, Skees Family Foundation, Western Union, and Facebook all of our partners deserve credit for their support and helping us guide this approach to scale.

Read more about what we learned from our 2020–21 farmer-centric (virtual) training.

Written by Bean Voyage

Edited by Kayla Sippl