CAN has developed an alternative trade model — AgroEco® Coffee — operating under principles of participation and transparency. CAN, US roasters, the importer, producer organizations, and farmers sit at the negotiating table together to bring coffee from Mexico and Nicaragua to the United States. We have guaranteed a higher price than Fair Trade, and the purchase of each pound contributes to a Sustainable Agriculture Fund and a Women’s Unpaid Labor Fund. These investment proceeds are managed collectively by farmers.

The Coffee Diversification Project, a  multi-year long project bringing together academics, researchers, farmers, and cooperative members from the United States, Mexico, and Nicaragua for data collection and capacity-building about agro-ecological diversification activities. 

The Community Agroecology Network (CAN) and Growing Justice (GJ) Youth Team, in collaboration with community gardeners, Tierras Milperas, will facilitate an intergenerational learning community to reconnect Latinx youth from farmworker families in Watsonville, California, to traditional agricultural knowledge and forms of social organization. The process of recuperating, producing and documenting traditional agricultural knowledge by youth will support an intergenerational connection needed to transform the local food systems and work towards community food sovereignty.

A collaboration between CAN and our partner organization PRODECOOP, RL, a coffee farmer cooperative organization in Northern Nicaragua. The project, launched in 2009, aims to improve food security and reduce seasonal hunger among 1500 smallholder coffee farming families in Northern Nicaragua. This will be achieved through the following strategies: improved food availability, access, and food utilization through CADAs, seed banks, farm diversification and experimentation, and organizational capacity building.

In 2011, CAN established the Youth Network for Food Security & Sovereignty (FSS) to promote a model of community youth leaders as the primary conduits for food system transformation. Since 2011, CAN has expanded its FSS initiatives, and consequently the Youth Network, into two more coffee growing regions in Nicaragua and México, and a Maya region in México. Currently, we are developing a new FSS initiative in Santa Cruz County (California). Networking and training of youth leaders across these initiatives deepens knowledge and capacity…

Since 2019, the Community Agroecology Network (CAN) and Ka’ Kuxtal Much Meyaj (Ka’ Kuxtal) have collaborated to articulate and strengthen Maya Agroecology in Campeche, Mexico, with the principal objectives of (1) integrating youth into community organization, (2) elevating Maya women’s ancestral contribution to the knowledge and practice of agroecology, and (3) defending native seeds and Maya homelands.