Welcome to the eleventh episode of Sustaining Craft the Podcast, a series that features those in a creative field. Listen below to learn more or keep scrolling to read about Geovanni Leiva and his plan to eradicate poverty with coffee!
Geovanni Leiva wants to bring the romance back into coffee.
Twenty years ago, he arrived in Little Rock, AR on a private scholarship, with $20 in his pocket.
Leiva was from a small, rural village in Guatemala. His father, Armando, was the oldest of six brothers and had to leave school after sixth grade to work on the coffee farm. Going to school meant walking for two-and-a-half hours one way, taking up valuable time when working on the family farm meant survival. “A kid, as soon as he’s able to care for himself, he has now become another way for us to get enough income to sustain the rest of the family,” Leiva explained. “Why would you think about investing in a book, sitting in front of somebody talking to you, when you could literally go out there and by working, you could be helping your entire family?”
Armando decided he wanted a different future for his two sons and daughter. “He has to do that, but he doesn’t want that for us,” Leiva explained. “So he says, ‘I’m going to move you to the city.’ He moves us seven hours from the farm so that we could go to school and finish school.”
Leiva graduated from high school and moved to Arkansas for college, with a scholarship from Garvin and Sally Abernathy, a family from North Little Rock. Needing to learn more English, Leiva enrolled in an intensive English language program. “I clearly remember one day–the Abernathys have to go to work,” Leiva shared. “They drop me off in front of this building and they say, ‘You go that way.’ And I’m sitting over there, on the steps because I’m early, and I happen to look up and I see an airplane go by. And I go, ‘My god, I just want to go back home. This is it. No way. I don’t want to do this.’”
Overwhelmed, Leiva wasn’t sure if it was all worth it. “I missed my family,” he said. “I missed back home. … You know, you have a dream sometimes and you wish you could be there, but you don’t realize how hard that is going to be to get to that dream. … I’m 18 years old, probably the longest I’ve ever been away from my mom and dad, and I’m 2,000 miles away from them, and I’m in a completely different world, not knowing how to eat.”
But he remembered his family, and why he had come to the United States in the first place. “How I got through that moment is knowing that I was created by God for a purpose, and I knew at that moment that it wasn’t just about me.” Leiva shared. “It was a process that I was being put through so that I could come on the other side and that one day, because one couple invested in my life, that I was going to then be able to pay it forward one day. And so I knew from that moment that it wasn’t about me, it was about something I was choosing to be a part of.”
Leiva became fluent in English within eight months. “People are still amazed,” he said. “They’re like, ‘Oh wow, you must have been smart.’ Maybe. But you know what I did? I studied from 8 am to about 2 am, 24 hours a day, it felt like, 7 days a week. I applied myself. I was there. I memorized books and books and books of verbs. I did all of that. Yeah, I accomplished it. … When you realize that you are here for other than your self-gratification, then that’s when the light bulb goes off. And then you go, ‘Oh, ok then. It’s not all about me.’”
But he missed Guatemala. “Guatemala is so beautiful, because, for many reasons, but one reason is it’s got so many micro-climates,” Leiva explained. “Its typography allows it to have mountains on one side, coast on one side, coast on the other side, rain forest, volcanic. It has tons of volcanoes all over, so soil can be different from one corner of the country to the next one. Beautiful weather. Its nickname is ‘The Eternal Spring.’”
Guatemala provides a lot of the coffee that the United States consumes, Leiva shared. “It is the number one exporter of coffee in the United States, because of its proximity and its fineness of coffee,” Leiva said. “The other thing about it is coffee on the east coast and the west coast and the central location, they all taste completely different. They all have really different characteristics, and the beautiful part about coffee is [that] coffee is a very complicated food element because there are so many traces of flavors that can come to it.”
And there’s a lot of work that goes into a cup of coffee. “It is this beautiful, elegant drink that you can really enjoy and get pieces of each of the origins that produce it, and at the same time, engage with the farmers who put so much labor,” Leiva said. “It is a labor-intensive crop. It is unbelievable how much care goes throughout the year, how much care goes through while picking it, and how much care it takes to and craft it takes to roast and pour and extract a cup of coffee. One of my goals and one of our goals as a company is to really start bringing the romance back into coffee. To really start getting people to engage back in with the craftsmanship of it.”
But Guatemala is also an underdeveloped third world country, Leiva explained. “Where my farm is, back when I came to the United States in 1997, it was literally stuck in the 1800s America,” he shared. “And what I mean by that, there were no roads. We could not drive to our house. We didn’t have electricity. We didn’t have running water. It’s literally, it’s this bunch of little houses in the middle of no fricking where, and that was our farm. That’s how Guatemala is. And that’s how a bunch of other countries around the world are. What people don’t get is that the coffee is picked by individual little families. That their livelihood is based on the fact that they can sell whatever they could grow in the backyard. This backyard could be 12 by 12, it could be an acre, two acres, three acres. But they depend on this. And if they don’t sell that, then somebody has to go search for that. And those are called coyotes. They come up there and purchase coffee from these rural places, aggregate to a bigger pile and bigger pile and that gets imported into the United States and that gets brokerage and all that. This is the way we did it. And that’s just what you do. You wake up and you go, ‘Let’s just go pick coffee.’”
The opportunity to not only go to the United States but be able to go back to visit Guatemala was unusual. Leiva earned his associate’s degree from Pulaski Tech, determined to return to Guatemala and start a business that combined his love of technology and faith.
However, during his last semester in college, he met his wife, Alana.
And his plans changed.
He graduated with a job offer, became a computer programmer, and, for the next fourteen years, he lived the American dream. He and Alana had two children, Elijah and Ethan, and they visited Guatemala once a year.
But he still missed his family and his village, and then, after a visit five years ago, while flying back to Arkansas, he came up with an idea. “It was probably the worst three hours of my life because I would feel so defeated,” Leiva said. “And I would feel so helpless. … Why me? Why, out of all these people, I get to do this? Over one of those trips, I’m reading a magazine, and I have my little napkin for my Sprite, and I see a Chinese proverb in a magazine that says, if you give a man a fish, you will feed him for a day, but if you teach him how to fish, you will feed him for a lifetime. And I realized that exactly had happened to me. I had been given that opportunity. I had been given that chance to– not only I was fed for one day, but I was actually given that opportunity. I realized, that’s exactly what I gotta do in my village. What if? And it started with that. Why if, why not? Why do I not bring their coffee, they grow coffee already. That’s what’s they’ve been doing for 60-plus years, ever since I’ve known them. What if I can get their coffee in the hands of my friends and family in the states? And then all of a sudden, I bridge the two, and while bridging the two, we break poverty? I was like, that’s it.”
Leiva shipped over 50 one-pound bags of green coffee beans and taught himself out to roast, while working full-time as a programmer. It was the first time, in four generations and over 60 years, that a Leiva roasted the coffee beans from their farm. “We just sold it on the regular market, we just sold it raw, and we never saw it after that,” Leiva explained. “My grandfather, who was a tremendous man, once said he wished that he could shake the person’s hand who was drinking his coffee. He wished he knew that the person who was drinking his coffee could appreciate everything. So if you stop and think about that, now I am here, two generations later, actually fulfilling my grandfather’s dream.”
Leiva continued his full-time job, working eight hours, coming home to help his wife with the kids, spend time with her, and then work from 9 pm until 3 or 4 am in the morning. For about six months, Leiva maintained the grueling schedule. There was some fear about leaving his programming work. “You’re asking me to give it all up for a dream?” Leiva said. “For a ‘What if?’”
He reached a breaking point. But his passion was there, and he knew he could make it work if he had the time to focus on it. He couldn’t ignore the fear–he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to feed his family. “This moment was not planned in our lives,” Leiva said of the decision to pursue the company, Leiva’s Coffee, full-time.
He quit his programming job, and it took time to build Leiva’s. The first year brought in a fraction of the salary he’d earned as a programmer. But he held onto his dream, and now, the company will be six years old in 2019. “I want to be in every home in America,” Leiva said. “I want every home in America to taste my coffee. Bill Gates once said he wanted every home in America to have a computer. And back when he said that, everybody was like, ‘Yeah, right.’ Well, look at us today. I’ve gone that bold. I want every home in America to enjoy a fine cup of coffee. That’s my goal number one.”
And he’s well on his way. He started by finding other people who believed in his mission. “It has been locking arms with like-minded people,” Leiva explained. “And that takes one at a time. That takes a Nexus. That takes a Capital Hotel. That takes all the individuals that come to our website and buy coffee. And that’s why we didn’t start with a brick-and-mortar place, because I didn’t want to be this flashy new guy. I wanted to be this person who was focused on the basics and who had a solid foundation, and the foundation is to have a solid mission, that is poverty eradication.”
Leiva has found immigration issues and poverty to be closely connected and wants Leiva’s Coffee to model a way to help other families. “It makes total sense why the immigration problem is the way it is, and I hate to be political in a way, but I really have a great point here,” Leiva said. “That is the reason why our way of doing things will fix the immigration problem. Because if I was in their position, if I was in my dad’s position, to have to feed my family, if I had to find a way, I would do exactly the same thing. But if I had a way to stay with my family, to stay with my kids, and at the same time, provide for them, and provide significance for myself, and provide work and do something that I love, why would I not stay back home? In order for us to fix it, we have to empower all these micro-communities and micro-financing, so these places, so these industries can get the benefits that they can get by trading with us. If you do this, and you start empowering these micro-communities and micro-economies, then that’s how you fix families and that’s how you fix immigration at its roots. And that’s how you fix poverty at its roots. Poverty can only be fixed if you capitalize and educate. But if you capitalize and not educate, then you create problems. If you educate without capitalizing, you educate and you give them all this hope … But then you don’t give them a way to do it. But if you do them at the same time, if you do it one by one, then that’s how you eradicate poverty. I’m an example of that. I’m a living example that if you capitalize and you educate, you break people from poverty, and because of that, my two boys today have no traces of poverty in their lives because that was in place in my life. … And that is what I hope to do in the entire coffee industry and throughout the entire world.”
Leiva doesn’t have the newest car or a yacht, but he does have the satisfaction of having followed his passion to help others and share a good cup of coffee. “If I will go to the grave today, I would go to the grave the most satisfied man because I chose to do something that seemed impossible,” he shared. “I led my family through that, I provided for my family and I provided for many other families at the same time and I left my fingerprint and I did legacy work. … Did I have a new boat? Did I drive a brand-new car? I drive a 14-year-old car that needs oil every two days that I can’t drive more than five hours. Who cares? Did I eat today? I had a wonderful three eggs today and I’ll be able to do it again tomorrow and I know my life matters for somebody else. My goal is that one day, sooner or later, I’ll get to share in front of crowds this story, drinking coffee with them. … And how a single coffee bean has the opportunity to touch so many lives.”
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Find Leiva’s Coffee at their website, on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
And of course, there is a LOT more in the episode! I did cut out a bit of my own commentary in the podcast on poverty and learning English because Leiva’s story was great, and I wanted to give him as much space to share his journey as possible. In addition to what is above, Leiva shared how his father responded when Leiva told him that he wanted to build a business, what’s happening in his village now, how his vision is impacting other villages, what connected him to his wife when they met, the importance of roasting, and so much more. Take a listen!