IMPACT
Rethinking what we mean by impact
1. The philosophy: moving beyond Living Income
When we buy coffee from a particular origin, what do we actually want to understand about the people and communities behind it?
One of the first questions we tend to ask when supporting coffee producers is whether they earn enough to make a decent living. It is an important question, and we understand why Living Income has become such a prominent part of the coffee industry's approach to impact.
But we believe there is a problem when it becomes the starting point, and sometimes the end point, of how we define and measure progress.
Living Income gives us a financial benchmark. It tells us whether someone's earnings meet a particular estimate of what it costs to live decently. But it doesn't tell us much about how they got there, how secure that income is or what opportunities they have to shape their own future.
A community could meet a Living Income benchmark while remaining dependent on expensive credit, unpredictable buyers and unequal trading relationships. Another community might still fall short of that benchmark while making meaningful progress towards financial independence, local value creation, stronger institutions and ecological regeneration.
Neither situation can be properly understood through income alone.
There is also a bigger question about who gets to decide what progress should look like. When we define impact through benchmarks developed outside the communities concerned, we risk measuring people against priorities that may not reflect their own ambitions or realities.
We believe impact needs to be understood within the context of each community, rather than reduced to a financial outcome defined elsewhere.
We want to understand what prosperity means to the people living there, what future they envision, what challenges stand in their way and what progress looks like to them.
This means moving away from simply asking whether producers have reached a predefined target and towards understanding the direction in which their communities want to move.
2. The data: what are we curious about?
If we want to understand development, we first need to understand what is actually happening within an origin and what influences it.
There is a tendency in sustainability reporting to start with a methodology and then send people into the field to collect the information needed to fill its indicators. The result can be a lot of data, but not necessarily a deeper understanding of the people and places behind it.
We don't want to collect information simply because a framework tells us to. We want to start with questions that help us build a more complete picture.
Some of the areas we are curious about include:
Economic independence: How do producers access finance? How dependent are they on external credit or individual buyers? Are they diversifying their income and gaining greater financial control?
Local value creation: Where does value remain within the community? Are there opportunities for local processing, infrastructure, employment and entrepreneurship?
Ecological regeneration: What is happening to soil health, biodiversity, water resources and the resilience of farming systems?
Community development: What are the priorities around education, healthcare, opportunities for women and young people, and stronger local institutions?
Ownership and decision-making: Who makes decisions? How inclusive and transparent are local structures? Are producers gaining greater control over their own future?
Trading relationships: How predictable are sales? Are payments timely? Are producers able to negotiate, plan and make independent decisions?
These are areas of exploration, not a fixed checklist. What matters will differ between origins, and the information we collect should reflect those differences.
We also need different kinds of information to understand what is happening. Payment records, access to finance and soil assessments can tell us certain things, while conversations with producers help us understand trust, autonomy, perceived fairness and the reasons behind particular developments.
The objective is not to collect as much data as possible. It is to identify what is useful, understand how different issues connect and recognise what is changing, why it is changing and what could support further progress.
3. The framework: from community priorities to path indicators
We want to explore how Slow Food's Participatory Guarantee System (PGS) could provide a foundation for this approach.
At its core, the idea is to give communities an active role in defining what good development looks like, assessing their own progress and learning from one another. Rather than imposing a universal set of standards, we want to build on this participatory approach to develop a framework that can be adapted to the realities of each origin.
We envisage three steps:
1. Understand the starting point
Work with each community to understand its current realities, ambitions, challenges and opportunities. What does it want to achieve? What stands in its way?
2. Define path indicators
Translate these priorities into indicators that help track development over time. These could relate to financial independence, ecological regeneration, local value creation or stronger community structures.
Rather than measuring success against a universal benchmark, these indicators would help us understand how far a community has come and where it wants to go next.
3. Review progress and adapt
Revisit these indicators regularly, combining verifiable information with the perspectives of the people involved. Understand what has changed, what has not, why and what needs to happen next.
The aim is to have a consistent way of understanding and following development without expecting every origin to follow the same path.
We see potential in bringing these findings together in a Living Trade Passport accompanying each coffee lot. It would combine information about the origin's development priorities and progress with coffee-specific information about pricing, payments, financing, quality and trading commitments.
Rather than a sustainability certificate or a grade, it would provide a transparent picture of the realities behind the coffee and the relationships through which it is traded.
4. Accountability: bringing everything into the open
This approach also means looking beyond what happens within the producing community.
The conditions in which producers operate are shaped by traders, financiers and buyers. If we want to understand whether trade is contributing to positive change, we need to examine the responsibilities of everyone involved.
Are buyers making reliable purchasing commitments? Are payments reaching producers on time? Is financing accessible and fair? Are risks distributed fairly? Are trading relationships helping producers become more independent?
Equally, if a community commits to improving quality, strengthening its organisation or investing in ecological practices, we should be able to follow up and understand what progress has been made and what support is needed.
This creates accountability in both directions. Producers and their organisations take ownership of the development priorities they define, while traders, financiers and buyers take responsibility for the conditions they create.
We also believe accountability requires being open to scrutiny beyond the people directly involved. We would like to involve people we trust and who understand our work, including Karl and Slow Food, in periodically reviewing the integrity of the framework, how it is being applied and whether the information it generates is meaningful. This would give us an opportunity to challenge our assumptions, learn from others and ensure the process remains aligned with the principles behind it.
We recognise that this approach may bring up uncomfortable questions and expose things that are not always easy to address. It may reveal gaps between what people say they do and what actually happens, or show that some of the challenges facing producers are also connected to the way the wider value chain operates.
But we believe this is precisely why it matters. We would rather have a process that brings these realities into the open than one that produces reassuring numbers without helping us understand what sits behind them.
The purpose of measuring impact should not be to give buyers another way to assess producers. It should be to help communities understand and take ownership of their development, while making everyone involved in the value chain accountable for their contribution to it.
We don't want to measure impact simply to report that it exists. We want to understand what is changing, why it is changing, who is contributing to that change and what needs to happen next.
