September 12, 2023 – John Abrams

Dean Cycon’s first novel, Finding Home (Hungary 1945), went on sale in June. It’s a riveting story of Auschwitz survivors coming home to their Hungarian town after the war and finding everything irrevocably changed. For them, the war was not over.

Eva, the teenage pianist protagonist, says that she is “not all that Jewish.” I sometimes think that about myself. But she was Jewish, and I am Jewish, and this is a stark and stunning reminder of what that can mean. (The last book that had that effect on me was The Lemon Tree, by Sandy Tolan).

While reading, I kept noticing the parallels between what is promulgated by the Trumpian segment of our population today and what was happening in Hungary after the war. I shared this observation with the author, who I have been talking to about his company, Dean’s Beans Organic Coffee. His response: “Since ‘othering’ and bystander behavior is happening again right here, I wanted to see if I could learn and share anything from the Jewish postwar experience.” He did, and it becomes a story about the depth of our humanity and the strength of our resilience which assure that evil never triumphs. At least not all the way.

About a month after Dean’s book came out, his business in Orange, MA, became a worker co-op after 30 years in operation under his stewardship.

Before going into business, while working as an environmental and indigenous rights lawyer in the eighties, Dean had founded a nonprofit to improve the lives and livelihoods of coffee-farming families. He soon decided charity was not enough to make a meaningful impact on the people who grow the beans that become the coffee we drink. He founded Dean’s Beans Organic Coffee to make a for-profit fair-trade specialty coffee company that could be a vehicle for social, economic, and environmental change.

Dean envisioned a viable business that could do more both to help the growers and their communities and to create good living-wage jobs in his depressed hometown. He wanted to treat employees with the utmost respect, pay well, provide stellar benefits, and practice his own seat-of-the-pants form of intuitive open book management.

He and his colleagues did all that, and they also completed an extraordinary array of development work in the coffeelands: reforestation and biodiversity projects to combat climate change and diversify income; women’s revolving loan funds; community-based cervical cancer detection and treatment; and a rural children’s literacy project. These people-centered efforts continue. Dean says, “We’re trying to change the terms of international trade by making true partnerships with primary producers. Change isn’t about the goods; it’s about embedding cooperative collaboration in their communities.”

But as Dean was approaching 70 and ready for a life of writing (and continuing activism), he wondered what to do with his beloved business. After years of seeking solutions, he was getting nowhere. “People wanted to buy it,” says Dean, “but they were more interested in money than the welfare of the employees and the farmers.” Dean wasn’t interested in unrestrained growth. He believed in “enough” and cared about the mission, not about getting his coffee into Trader Joe’s.

Enter Beth Spong.

Dean hired Beth as a consultant to help with workflow, process improvements, and team alignment. He later said to her, “I want you to project-manage my transition to retirement.” She accepted the challenge.

At some point in their process, Dean realized he could sell the thriving $6.5M business to his 15 employees. “Who better to carry on the mission than the folks who’ve been doing it all these years?” he said. “Some of them have been here 20 years.”

But they needed leadership. Dean knew someone in the specialty coffee industry who seemed to have promise, but that person turned out to be just another guy with visions of growth and an eventual big buyout. Discussing this, Beth suddenly heard herself say, “You should hire me to run the company.” Until that moment, the thought had never crossed her mind, but she realized she was ready for “a left turn in my life” after working as a consultant for 15 years. She became full-time COO with the understanding that she would become CEO of the new employee-owned entity if all went according to plan.

It did. They engaged the Business Ownership Solutions division of the Cooperative Development Institute (CDI) to orchestrate the worker cooperative conversion. Rob Brown of CDI says, “Dean’s Bean’s is unusual. The mission is deeply rooted. The development work they do in coffee-growing communities is not charity – it’s simply a cost of doing business and making a difference, baked into the company’s ethics, culture, and bottom line.”

The transition was completed in mid-2023; the company is now owned and led by the employees who helped build it. Dean has little involvement; he’s mainly a sounding board for Beth. A valuable one, according to her: “He’s so smart, so values-driven and visionary, with such deep knowledge of coffee and the industry. He is an epic human being!”

And Beth? She’s learning all the time alongside the Dean’s team as they embrace their new world of cooperative ownership. “I’m constantly working on the edge of what I know and I love it,” she says. At 62, she figures she’ll be there five to seven years, and she’s excited to build new leadership for the next transition.

If you’re in the mood for a great historical novel, don’t miss Finding Home. As Dean says, “There’s a relationship between the co-op conversion and the book: both are ways for me to express my passion for justice.”

And then there’s the coffee.