We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Benjamin Higgins a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Benjamin, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Almost every entrepreneur we know has considered donating a portion of their sales to an organization or cause – how did you make the decision of whether to donate? We’d love to hear the backstory if you’re open to sharing the details.

Generous Coffee donates 100% of our profits to nonprofits.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is Ben Higgins and I am a husband, dog owner, and the President of Generous International. If I am not on the golf course I am working in my in home office on a project very near to my heart. Generous International (best known as Generous Coffee Co.) is a project my friends and I started in 2017. Generous mission is to sell the highest quality products that are fair trade and then donate 100% of our profits to nonprofits helping fight human injustice around the world. We dream of being a sustainable fundraising source for nonprofits that are effective, efficient, and sustainable. We do this because we believe for profit business (we call ourselves for purpose) can be an integral piece of the engine for the good that comes to this world.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Due to our donation model Generous typically does not have a large amount of funds in reserve for growth, investment, etc. As a result we have had to continue to find ways to measure financial success without seeing a growing bank account. We measure this by hearing the stories from the people who have benefited from our donations. We also find success in hearing the stories of people who have consumed our coffee in their home over a conversation with a friend, a memory with a loved one, or just a simple moment of silence to recharge for the day ahead. We continue to celebrate these stories because that is what keeps us going and growing and working as hard as we can to increase the amount of these stories.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Generous is a for purpose business. I have personally had to learn to grow a business outside of your traditional ways of growing. What I mean by this is we have to tell the story of Generous and the dreams we have and the success we have had to get more people to buy our coffee. It is about story telling and impact more than financial success or comfort. This is also one of the best parts of Generous because we care more about the impact than we do how much money we as individuals at Generous can put into our pockets.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.Generouscoffee.com
• Instagram: higgins.ben and generous_coffee_
• Linkedin: Ben Higgins