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COFFEE KIDS OAXACA, MEXICO BY KRISTINA MORRIS HEREDIA BY KRISTINA MORRIS HEREDIA COFFEE KIDS AND THE IMPORTANCE OF CAPACITY BUILDING While it's true that a small donation can go a long way in community development, lasting change comes from capacity building, one of the five program areas in which Coffee Kids works. Capacity building begins with the recognition of the obstacles in any given community that prevent them from reaching their developmental goals. By addressing these obstacles, communities move beyond a perpetual need for assistance, and members learn to be better coffee farmers, administrators and professionals. Coffee Kids not only supports capacity building projects, we also do the capacity building ourselves. One example of this is the recent Capacity Building workshop in Oaxaca, Mexico, that we hosted for eight of our program partners. Our program partners are nonprofit organizations or cooperatives located in coffee-growing communities. We partner with them to be able to provide communities with hands-on development projects that meet their needs, as defined by the communities themselves. For three days, eight program partners from three Mexican states came together to gather the tools and knowledge necessary to keep their organizations alive and flourishing. Laws and regulations, as they pertain to Mexican nonprofits, are ever changing and difficult to understand. This has led to a number of crises within many of our program partners that have threatened their very survival and, therefore, ability to continue supporting the coffee-farming communities where they work. "As we know, being unfamiliar with the law does not excuse you from complying with it," said International Program Coordinator Pedro Pérez. "Therefore Coffee Kids is hosting this workshop to help its partner organizations better understand how these laws function so that they can comply to the full extent of the law and avoid jeopardizing their organizations." Our program partner, the Center for the Support of the Oaxacan Popular Movement (CAMPO) in Oaxaca, Mexico, generously donated 38 barista magazine the use of its community building to host the workshop. The building is complete with dormitories where all 15 participants stayed. The accounting firm, Accounting Services and Integrated Development Enterprise, S.C., which has extensive experience teaching community and social organizations, led the workshop. SELF DISCOVERY The first day of the workshop was marked by the difficult task of defining the weaknesses of each organization. The next phase then was to consider how those weaknesses could become strengths, and what tools could be used to make it so. One component of the workshop was that of solidarity and cooperation. Participants shared information, experiences and expertise with each other and did not rely solely on the workshop facilitators to lead discussion. Participants not only supported each other in the workshop, but also helped with the duties needed to make things run smoothly, such as preparing meals. The result was a close-knit community. The discussions lasted into the night and helped gear participants up for another full day. After some time to tour downtown Oaxaca, participants reconvened for the next segment of the workshop, which included fun-filled topics such as asset management, wages, and—by far the most popular topic of the day—accounts receivable and revenue. After such topics and the intense discussions that followed, the participants were in need of a break. The day ended at 4 p.m. HOT TOPICS The theme of the third day was how to become a tax-deductible organization. Rather than provide the participants with a magic formula, the facilitators led a brainstorming session in which the participants came up with their own solutions to their problems, thereby realizing that they are capable of not only becoming a tax-deductible organization, but also of working together to effectively address community challenges. The workshop concluded with a feedback session in which participants, such as Margaret MacSems from our program partner Everything as Indigenous