Special Grounds Coffee Talk

At the beginning of the year, we began discussing the possibility of partnering with local schools, churches and non-profit organizations to develop fundraising programs to support their organizations that centered around coffee.

Typical fundraising programs promote the sale of food items (ie: candy bars, popcorn, pizza, cookie dough and various sweets). Most of these products are not locally made and come from large national wholesalers. Our hope was to create a program that would feature reasonably priced, locally sourced products that provided an amazing return on investment to the organization selling them.

Before we launched our fundraising plans, we were approached by Liberty Center Schools, who had been selling Special Grounds coffee to their school through their Tigers Breakfast and Brew Crew coffee cart. Every two weeks the LC crew loads up their carts with freshly brewed coffee from Special Grounds, hot chocolate, granola bars and donuts and begins filling and delivering orders across the district.

We developed a fundraising program for Liberty Center students to sell coffee to their friends and families. We even created a private label roast, called TIGER FUEL, specifically for Liberty Center schools to be the featured coffee in this program.

What an amazing experience this has been for all of us! Liberty Center Schools sold over 1,400 bags of coffee over the course of the past month, raising almost $9,000 for their school’s PTO.

A few LC students even had the opportunity to come tour the coffee shop and career center and helped label over 900 bags of the coffee they sold.

From start to finish, our coffee is not only benefiting the organizations with whom we partner, but it is also benefiting those individuals who are helping make the product!