For 18 months, the coffee industry has remained mostly silent about the ongoing destruction of Gaza. A new fundraiser hopes to raise money—and jolt the industry awake.
For paid subscribers: I’ve written before about Starbucks’ myriad climate issues, but now conservative activist shareholders are trying to weaponise those failings in service of a climate denialist goal.
A Fundraiser for Gaza Hopes to Wake Up the Coffee Industry
For 18 months, the coffee industry has remained mostly silent about the ongoing destruction of Gaza. A new fundraiser hopes to raise money—and jolt the industry awake.
Coffee likes to tout itself as an ethical enterprise. Almost every coffee roaster, from small, indie brands to multinational corporations, relies on marketing itself as a sustainable player in the coffee industry. That is especially true in the specialty market, which often distinguishes itself as “better”—sourcing better coffee, paying better prices, and doing better for the world—than standard, commodity-grade coffee.
Despite coffee often relying on a moral high ground in its marketing and identity, even taking a political stance when necessary, some have pushed back on the idea that coffee is political. It’s not uncommon to hear things like “stick to coffee” or “coffee shouldn’t be political,” when bringing up politically charged points—witness the reaction on Facebook to what is a fairly neutral article I wrote on tariffs.
The reality, however, is that coffee is political, and the industry is often perfectly fine weighing in on such topics—it just depends on the cause.
Climate change, for example, is inherently political, and yet is relatively uncontroversial: Many coffee businesses talk about sustainability initiatives they’re taking to combat changing weather patterns.
Then there are the issues on which the industry stays silent: Take coffee’s continued indifference to the tragedy unfolding in Gaza.
I’ve come back to the subject of coffee’s inaction on Gaza several times over the last 18 months, and while some in the industry have spoken up, the general trend is still one of silence and wilful ignorance. Hopefully that is beginning to change: On April 14th, David Lalonde of Canadian coffee company Rabbit Hole Roasters launched a fundraiser called Coffee People for Palestine, an invitation for everyone in the industry to get involved and pledge support to the people of Gaza.
The goal of the fundraiser is two-fold: first, to raise money to support The Sameer Project, a mutual aid group that works to get emergency supplies to displaced families in Gaza. Secondly—and perhaps more ambitiously—Lalonde hopes to jolt the coffee industry from its collective slumber and put its ethical posturing to the test.
It was important, Lalonde says, to partner with others “to show that I’m not the only coffee person who wants to do something and that I’m not just this weird person screaming into the void”.
As well as to raise money, Lalonde’s goal with the fundraiser is to push the coffee industry to do more. “In a nutshell, [the aim] is to wake up the coffee industry,” he says.
The fundraiser supports the Sameer Project, a London-based initiative run by four Palestinians in the diaspora. They work directly with a team on the ground in Gaza to disperse medical supplies, food and water, diapers and baby formula, and direct cash support.
“The Sameer Project always stood out to me because it's a Palestinian-funded and -run organisation that has been on the ground in Gaza since the beginning”, Lalonde says. “So donating to them was really important to me, because I know that they will do everything with their people in mind”.
Wake Up
Lalonde hopes his directness will motivate those who have been passive to get engaged. He posted about the fundraiser on his Instagram account, urging people to share and spread widely. The post has over a thousand likes and was shared nearly 700 times.
“Everybody who saw the post that I made [on Instagram] has no excuse now not to do something. I know that this fundraiser is not going to be able to stop [the genocide], but the more people talk about it, the more people know where to look and how to take action”.
There is precedent for such action. In 2022, the coffee industry came together in support of Ukraine after the country was invaded by Russia. The Specialty Coffee Association “[stood] in solidarity with the Ukrainian coffee community”, donated ticket sales from World of Coffee, one of the industry’s biggest global events, and barred Russia from participating in the 2022 World Coffee Championships. Companies across the world launched fundraisersto support the Ukrainian coffee community.
In contrast, the SCA—and much of the wider industry—has been silent in response to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. “The discrepancy between the response from the coffee community when it comes to Ukraine and then Palestine is completely staggering”, Lalonde says. “I know the community can come together because I've seen it before. So what's the excuse?”
With several influential coffee influencers having shared Lalonde’s Instagram post about the fundraiser, Tahani Hassan, co-owner of Tabeeb Roasters with her husband Mohammed Awad, hopes the fundraiser will normalize speaking up. However, there is still a long way to go.
“While the response to our fundraiser has been overwhelmingly positive, there remains a broader reluctance within the coffee community to take decisive action”, Hassan says. “It's clear that many people understand what is right, yet a certain hesitancy persists, preventing them from stepping forward. While we’ve seen some encouraging signs, much work remains”.
Desperate Conditions
Lalonde chose to run the fundraiser through May 15th because it is the commemoration day for the Nakba. Also known as the Palestinian Catastrophe, the Nakba refers to the ethnic cleansing and destruction of the Palestinian homeland beginning in 1948.
“The Nakba is an enterprise of displacement and replacement of people that continues to this very day”, said Riyad Mansour, the United Nations Permanent Observer of the State of Palestine, at an event at the U.N. headquarters in New York City in 2024.
For the past 19 months, the people of Gaza have lived in desperate conditions, with Israeli forces and civilians periodically blocking outside aid from entering the besieged territory.
The U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, said in March 2024 that the restrictions on humanitarian aid “may amount to the use of starvation as a method of war, which is a war crime”. That same month, the U.N. food agency said that “famine is imminent” in northern Gaza, with 70% of the population experiencing “catastrophic hunger”.
Nine out of 10 people in northern Gaza were eating less than a meal per day in December 2023, according to the World Food Programme. Since October 2023, there have been ongoing reports of children suffering from malnutrition, with Gaza’s ministry of health counting at least 60,000 “at risk of serious health complications due to malnutrition” in April 2025. Israel has not allowed any aid to enter the territory since March 2nd.
It’s not just food: in March 2024, CNN reported that Israel “has imposed arbitrary and contradictory criteria” on what aid could reach Gaza, with healthcare equipment, sleeping bags, cancer medication and maternity kits blocked from entering. Israel has attacked hospitals, to the point that, by February 2024, “every hospital in Gaza is either damaged, destroyed, or out of service due to lack of fuel; only 13 hospitals are even partially functioning”, according to Annie Sparrow and Kenneth Roth in Foreign Policy.
The Sameer Project has been working within these straitened circumstances to deliver aid on the ground. “We started a small group in April. We thought this was going to be like a month or two. We didn’t have the expectation that the world would watch a genocide go on for over a year”, Sameer Project co-founder Hala Sabbah told Amba Guerguerian of The Indypendent in November 2024.
Altogether, the Sameer Project has raised more than $2.68 million to provide thousands of meals, millions of litres of fresh water, as well as firewood, clothes, tents, shoes, and sanitary protection to displaced Gazans around the territory.
‘Dig a Little Deeper’
The group has several ongoing campaigns targeting different parts of Gaza—one focused on the south, another dedicated to the Refaat Alareer displacement camp, and one focused on the north in collaboration with the Translating Falesteen project. The Coffee People for Palestine fundraiser is supporting the latter initiative in the north of the territory.
Anyone based in the United States or Canada who donates to the fundraiser and sends proof to Lalonde will be entered into a raffle to win a book—“A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict” by Ilan Pappe—as well as coffee, Palestinian olive oil, a keffiyeh, and a tatreez, which is a form of Palestinian embroidery.
This raffle, which closes on April 28th, has two goals: to encourage more people to donate and to showcase Palestinian culture. Lalonde’s hope is that “all the cultural aspects of the raffle could maybe help people dig a little bit deeper into everything Palestinian”.
Additionally, Lalonde launched a mini-fundraiser through his roastery, selling a coffee called Coffee for Palestine, with all profits going to the Sameer Project.
‘True Solidarity Costs Something’
Going forward, Hassan hopes that the fundraiser can inspire more mobilisation and advocacy within the coffee industry and beyond. “We want people to feel empowered to use their voices and act with purpose”, she said. “When the coffee industry stands together for something as important as justice, it can spark a ripple effect that inspires others across industries to do the same”.
Lalonde hopes to see more people take concrete action in addition to advocacy. “We have to do more with the privilege that we have”, he says. “I just want the coffee industry to be not so focused on [things like] particle size distribution and start focusing more on wealth redistribution, because we can talk all we want—we always talk a good game in the specialty industry—but words are cheap”.
He also agrees with Hassan that the fundraiser’s success can be a template for the industry moving forward. “The author Cole Arthur Riley said, ‘True solidarity costs something’”, Lalonde says. “We need a sustained movement so that it becomes something bigger and more impactful and more powerful. It’s for Palestine right now, but if we can get this momentum going, I think there’s a place to do way more inside and outside the coffee industry. So yeah—this is not over, people”.
This article is a collaboration between The Pourover and Boss Barista. You should subscribe to Boss Barista, and donate to the Coffee People for Palestine fundraiser.
I'm the creator and writer of The Pourover. Based in Scotland, I have over a decade of experience in the specialty coffee industry as a barista, roaster, and writer. Ask me about coffeewashing.
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