I Survived

At Mighty Peace Coffee, our values: people, the planet, and peace drive our decisions. When the pandemic hit, we found ourselves in a position to do more than deliver epic coffee and powerful transformative coffee stories. Host JD Stier's background is in public policy and documentary filmmaking. In 2014 JD was hired to produce a 30 part documentary series profiling Ebola survivors. He flew from New York City into West Africa at the height of the Ebola outbreak, where he and his film crews worked with survivors in the three hardest countries: Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. We are many weeks into this pandemic, and we are shocked at the lack of lessons we’re deriving from West Africa. West Africans were successful in containing the outbreak, protecting the rest of the planet.

 

The coffee industry is a global network of worldly, highly educated, and intellectually curious leaders. No other industry on earth has such a commitment to global citizenship, global cooperation, and working level expertise operating all around the world, including in some pretty rough countries, from The Americas to Africa and Asia. We had planned to launch our podcast, The Mighty Pod, interviewing epic baristas, bad ass roasters, farmers with swag from the Congo, yea - people like you, And we look forward to launching our podcast at an appropriate time. As Covid struck, we found ourselves in a position to be the ones to share those West African lessons, that successful focus which contained and ultimately shut down the Ebola outbreak. So instead of simply launching The Mighty Pod, today we launch a special eight part series, We Rise. 

 

We hope you enjoy our special series, our epic Congo coffee, and a music video JD produced as part of the Ebola response:

Omekongo - We Rise