Gazette.Net: Blessed Coffee in Takoma Park offers perks to community
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Tebabu Assefa hopes one day his Blessed Coffee company will grow from Internet wholesaler to Takoma Park landmark, complete with a coffee shop on Carroll Avenue in the heart of the city’s Old Town business district.

In that way, Assefa is like many new small business owners. He has short- and long-term projections and a detailed strategy to transform his idea into a profitable venture.

But Assefa also has pledged that Blessed Coffee will be about serving the community in more ways than just brewing coffee. At an event Friday to inaugurate Blessed Coffee as an official benefit corporation, Assefa welcomed local and state lawmakers including Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) to the gazebo in Old Town Takoma Park to outline his goal.

Blessed Coffee is the state’s second benefit corporation, a concept created by a 2010 state law to protect companies that donate money to social causes. Assefa said he plans to donate 50 percent of net profit from his wholesale revenue to social programs in the coffee-growing regions of his native Ethiopia. Fifty percent of his net profit from his planned coffee shop — Assefa said he plans to open his own space on Carroll Avenue in eight months — will go to more than a dozen community organizations in the Takoma Park and Silver Spring area.

“The most important part of this is the community,” Assefa said. “We can create wealth, not only for ourselves, but we can give back the wealth to our community for social and economic development. Because the well-being of the community is directly related to our soul, our psyche, our humanity, our existence.”

The law, spearheaded by state Sen. Jamie Raskin (D-Dist. 20) of Takoma Park, protects businesses that donate profits to outside stakeholders from lawsuits from shareholders.

“The sole mission of businesses, typically, is to maximize profit, and shareholders can sue if you did something that was against maximizing profit,” said Erik Trojian, director of policy at B-Lab, a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit organization lobbying state governments for benefit corporations. “Tebabu says he wants to give 50 percent of his profits away to charities. Well, that would be grounds for a lawsuit. So if you create a new corporate form, like a benefit corporation, you can freely do this without fear of a lawsuit.”

Maryland was the first state to enact benefit corporation legislation. Another Takoma Park-based company, The Big Bad Woof pet store, was the first official benefit corporation in the state. Virginia followed with its own benefit corporation law in March. A number of other states are considering adopting their own benefit corporation statutes. Trojian said states governments are attracted to the idea because it requires a small change in corporate law that does not cost the state.

O’Malley tasted some of the company’s coffee and lauded Assefa and Takoma Park leaders for their leadership.

“This is a new type of corporation that balances making a profit with the responsibility of making a positive impact in this world, in the lives of our neighbors,” O’Malley said. “We have some visionary entrepreneurs in our state, and apparently two of the most visionary, of course, have come out of Takoma Park.”

Roz Grigsby, executive director of the Old Takoma Business Association, said the idea of a benefit corporation was “a perfect fit” for the city.

After the event, Assefa personally thanked a number of local residents, business owners and politicians who attended.

“I am a lucky guy,” Assefa said. “Everybody here is somebody I know, somebody I’ve worked with. It tells you, serving the public good is the highest honor in the world. Money can not get that.”

akraut@gazette.net