The Coalition Home Ground Coffee project was still in its infancy when Larry Hamilton entered the homeless shelter. Hamilton had only been there three days before John “Juancho” Donahue, the recently deceased leader of the Chicago Coalition of the Homeless, invited him into his office, rumbling the life-altering phrase, “I remember you.”

Hamilton was once an aspiring politician and a member of the Black Panthers. Then life turned the tables on him. Before he knew it, he was a down-and-out homeless man living on the streets of Chicago, without a dime to his name or an inkling of hope.

It had been a long time since Larry had seen Donahue. Juancho was one of the South Side priests who Larry dealt with when he was 16, and the youngest member in the history of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers. Juancho had helped the young Panther serve free breakfasts and give away free clothes throughout the community.

38 years later, they crossed paths again. That day, Juancho insisted Larry speak in support of the rally the CCH was planning at City Hall the following week. Spending the day getting himself fired up and preaching in front of the camera about the necessity of making a living wage got Larry back on track. As Larry put it, “I had just gotten off the streets and was still traumatized, but Juancho told me, ‘I’ve seen you ride the horse before, Larry. You just fell off and now is the time to get back on. I believe in you.’ When someone like that encourages you, that’s all it really takes. I went in like a Storm Trooper.”

Three years ago, Coalition Home Ground Coffee (formerly known as “Coalition Café”) was launched as the brainchild of Juancho, the spearhead behind the 25-year-old Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. The Coffee Project was designed to create relationships with coffee farmers in developing countries and pay them a “Fair Trade” price for their beans, instead of the “Free Trade” price that most of the world uses. Juancho had much experience with farmers in poor countries; when he was a young priest working in Panama, the Catholic Church assigned him to provide help to the struggling coffee farmers. Juancho envisioned a way to aid impoverished coffee farmers, build the CCH, and help Chicago’s homeless.

Larry jumped into the coffee project, working his way up within the Coalition, from homeless volunteer to the paid position of Coordinator of the Coffee Project. This was the exact kind of job he’d been hoping for and one that he could wrap his heart and soul around; this was a place that needed him as much as he needed it. “Since I was 16, I had been through the valley of the shadow of death, not only with the trauma and pressure I experienced being a Black Panther, but as a young father and a product of the 60’s, I was doing drugs and drinking while living in the projects. Then, if this don’t beat all, at a very young age, I was diagnosed with acute ulcerative colitis, and it’s plagued me and been on my back like a ball and chain throughout my entire life.”

At the same time Larry was living on the streets and figuring out a way to survive, scores of farmers in Nicaragua were living the same struggle, eking out a meager existence with any means available. Surviving on pennies a day, and living not far from a massive garbage dump, the farmers and their families would sometimes have to sift through the garbage just to get by, often destroying their health in the process. Now aware of the parallel between himself and these farmers, Larry empathizes with the folks he does business with. “Not only were the Nicaraguans victims of Hurricane Mitch, but because of the lead in the trash, some of them lost their vision and their respiratory systems are shot. Like me, these people had been kicked to the curb, stomped on…and then dared to get back up again.”

With Larry’s help, the Coffee Project is changing these farmers’ lives. The project has recently been aligned with Just Coffee, an organic, fair trade bean distributor headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin. The supplier works exclusively with farms of less than 12 acres, so the actual product gets a high degree of attention. Not only do the Nicaraguan coffee farmers get a fair trade price for their beans (currently $1.42 per organic pound, 3-4 times the “Free Trade” prices), they get to rebuild their own community by helping build schools and preserving the environment. Larry can now laugh as he gushes about the skills of small farmers, and happily recalls, “When I was a boy, we would spend the summers with my grandmother, driving all across the Southern states…It was a chance for a city boy to commune with nature and see the big picture in how people work with the earth. Small farms are like that, in that the farmers have a desire to produce a distinctive product of high quality. If it’s not the best, it just ruins their day.”

Just Coffee recently took their entire team, along with several members of their coffee co-op, and visited two of their bean growers in Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico. Working hands-on during the harvest season with the farmers is just one way to connect the supplier with the coffee grower and provide a superior product to the average coffee drinker. Larry, taking it one step further and tweaking the entire project to make it work for him, explains “I’m involved, enthused and committed to selling this product because of racism and classes that exist in the world economy. Period.”  

Via this relationship with a spirited group of coffee farmers, the project is ready to be restructured and redefined as an organizing tool that can develop leaders out of the homeless. By training them to be capable of doing outreach and recruiting members, Larry hopes it will result in a membership organization for the CCH. When asked what types of people would become members of the organization, Larry quickly replied, “Anyone who agrees and understands that in a just society, housing is a human right. This is the ultimate banner for us.”

Digging deep back into his politically-driven youth, Larry is ready to embrace and facilitate the future of the Coffee Project. As he puts it, “This organization is ready to walk into the 21^st century with ideas, strategies and policies that will have an impact on society and I want to dedicate my life to defending our people.”

The ultimate, long-term goal for the Coalition is to own and operate a cafe in the South Loop. The Coalition Café, which would be a cutting-edge coffee shop, run by homeless people and serving air-roasted, organic, fair-trade, shade-grown coffee. By making a fair wage, perhaps for the first time ever, the homeless employees would be empowered to get off the streets and rebuild their lives. Larry steadfastly believes in the old adage, “if you build it, they will come”, and he ultimately wants to work on ending homelessness altogether. “Homelessness is a sincere struggle and we want to attack a problem that needs to be eliminated. It’s solvable and we’re happy to use coffee to educate the public on CCH’s issues.”

Pay a living wage, get the homeless off the streets, provide a fair income for small bean growers around the world, train the homeless to become leaders, restructure an organization, build a thriving café, and establish a brand name for a bag of beans. All this over a cup of black water. Incredible, isn’t it?

By the way, Home Ground coffee is deliciously strong, with a sweet, earthy finish. It is sold by the pound (regular is $10 and decaf is $12) at select coffee shops all over the Chicago area, at local farmers markets and online at chicagohomeless.org.