You've heard of drinking responsibly, well it’s high time to drink socially responsibly. Lemonaid and ChariTea is a project that pioneers a new take on social drinking: the range of seven soft drinks and ice teas not only taste good, as a social enterprise, they also do good.
Using ingredients that are organic, vegan and sourced from small-scale farming cooperatives in Sri Lanka, Paraguay, Mexico and South Africa. Lemonaid & ChariTea are committed to paying higher prices for their raw ingredients and, vitally, they support a fair and humane agriculture. With help from the Fairtrade Bonuses, local farmers can improve their living conditions and initiate community projects.
Every bottle of Lemonaid & ChariTea that is sold also contributes to improving communities, with the drinks company having just raised £1,000,000 for development aid projects, including education, childcare, mental health and infrastructural initiatives.
Dedicated to supporting local projects that improve social, ecological and economical structures in those parts of the world that global economic developments have placed at a significant disadvantage, the company donates five pence for every bottle sold to the not-for-profit charitable organization Lemonaid and ChariTea e.V.
One example of how the drinks company has helped is, in return for sourcing rooibos tea from the post-apartheid Heiveld alliance in South Africa, Lemonaid and ChariTea finance a solar power system that now supplies the villages with electricity.
Germany's popular Fairtrade brands have recently hit the shelves in the UK. The UK Founder Julian Warowioff comments: "We started the Lemonaid & ChariTea project with the vision of turning the for-profit sector on its head. Being firm believers that businesses should not merely benefit their shareholders, we set out to prove that a soft drink can be a successful means to fundraising. Whilst the Social Enterprise is quickly growing, we stay true to our principles of immediacy and transparency, visiting the social projects annually and building long-lasting and mutually beneficial relationships with the farming communities. As an example, we are currently working with our rooibos tea growers in South Africa to co-finance the expansion of their cultivation area, allowing them to increase their yield and providing more members of the co-operative access to partake in organic rooibos farming."
You can find out more about Lemonaid and ChariTea by visiting Lemonaid and ChariTea.
The above article by Nisha Kotecha first published on goodnewsshared.com in Jul, 2016.
