Many Jewish community organizations, like many other non-profit institutions, try to defray their costs by selling products. But how many boxes of candy and how many rolls of wrapping paper do people need or want to have and keep around?
Coffee, however, is a product that many people use daily. And coffee is becoming one way to help Milwaukee’s Jewish community, thanks in large part to Gregory S. Dorf.
Dorf is the founder of and the energy behind Tribal Blends, a brand of coffees, teas and cocoa that is being sold at or by several Milwaukee Jewish community institutions, which receive 40-50 percent of the selling price.
The CAFA B DATA at the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center both serves the products and sells bags or containers of them. The coffee goes by the names of Boker Brew and (decaffeinated) Lila Roast; and Shocolad (Hebrew for chocolate) is the name of the cocoa.
In fact, Dorf said that the JCC and its executive director, Mark Shapiro, were privy to the project before its official launch in October 2009.
“We thought it a great idea to have our own branded coffee and a great way to raise money for our own scholarship fund,” said Shapiro in a recent telephone interview. “As a whole, we’re thrilled to support the idea.”
The Mequon Jewish Preschool also sells the Tribal Blends products. “This made a lot of sense, and we thought it was a quality product,” said MJP director Rivkie Spalter in a telephone interview. “So we felt good about providing this for the community.”
Also selling Tribal Blends in the community to date are the Milwaukee Jewish Day School and Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun, said Dorf in an interview at Alterra Café-Humboldt.
The project is about more than providing funds for local institutions and their patrons. Dorf said that the ways the coffee, teas and cocoa are purchased and distributed benefit the producers as well.
The coffee, teas and cocoa are purchased directly from the farmers in the different countries, and the farmers receive the “world market price,” Dorf said. “We’ve taken out brokers, distributors, and retailers.”
The coffee is roasted and packaged by Alterra in Milwaukee before being distributed to the selling institutions, Dorf said. (The cocoa is produced and packaged by Milwaukee’s Omanhene, a company owned by Steve Wallace. Though not yet for sale, the organic green and herbal teas will be packaged by a local niche tea company.)
“The only people that touch the coffee,” said Dorf, are the farmers that grow it, the Alterra people that roast and package it, and the consumers.
Moreover, in addition to being kashrut certified, the coffee and cocoa are Fair Trade Certified by TransFair USA. This is a non-profit organization based in Oakland, Calif., that, according to its Web site, seeks to create “a more equitable global trade model that benefits farmers, workers, consumers, industry and the earth.”
Tribal Blends products are also certified as organic by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Dorf said.
All this makes the project an example of what Dorf calls “vertical philanthropy” in that it “touches social and economic development at three levels: the farmer, the local manufacturer, and the non-profit organization.”
Milwaukee-native Dorf, 45, said that this project is bringing “full circle” his personal interests, experiences and history. He has been interested in social service and especially international economic development since high school and he served in the Peace Corps in Costa Rica in the late 1980s.
However, he is also a businessman whose day job is senior vice president in charge of commercial banking for JPMorgan Chase in Milwaukee.
He said people have asked him about this seeming contradiction, but he said the two endeavors “are not that different. They are almost the same in that you spend all your time helping other people who are trying to better their lives.”
Active in the Jewish community, Dorf is a member of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s board of directors and the JCC’s executive committee.
In fact, he said, “I serve the Jewish community with an agenda”: to try to find ways “to help young families afford to participate in the Jewish community.”
While the community does “a nice job” of supporting low-income families, families that are not affluent find participation in such programs difficult. Dorf said he knows this from personal experience.
“It took me 15 years almost to be able to pay the full cost” of the programs he and his family – wife and three children – use. “That was probably the most difficult task I ever accomplished.”
“Knowing how difficult it was for me inspired me to try to make it easier for others,” he said.
“We have so many wonderful programs in this community for our kids and for families. I just want to do my part to help make them more available to more people. Tribal Blends is part of that effort,” he said.
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