De La Gente

De La Gente is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit (EIN 46-5272405) headquartered in Reno, Nevada, with its operating base in La Antigua Guatemala. Its work centers on smallholder coffee cooperatives in villages around Antigua, named directly on its site — the Coffee Growers of San Miguel Escobar and the La Familia Collective among them — rather than an unnamed generic "local farmers" claim. The organization states its mission as "creating sustainable economic opportunities for smallholder farmers and their communities, including equitable access to markets," and frames the coffee industry itself as a problem to work around: "the coffee world can be opaque, making it hard to know who benefits and who doesn't." Rather than only exporting green coffee, De La Gente runs cooperative capacity-building programs, community tourism, and immersion trips that bring visitors directly to the farms — a model that channels tour and retail revenue back to the partner cooperatives instead of routing it through a conventional export middleman. Its stated core values — transparency, respect and openness, innovation, empowerment, and accountability — read as an operating checklist for a nonprofit supply chain rather than café marketing language. For a coffee-tourism operator, the specificity of naming its partner cooperatives, publishing its EIN, and stating its own critique of industry opacity gives De La Gente a more verifiable claim to "farm-direct" than the phrase usually carries.