Meet the Team: Ben Morgan—Operations Manager

In 2014, Ben Morgan, our operations manager, spent four months in Siquatepeque, Honduras. He walked up dirt roads and slugged through coffee fields. He shared family meals with locals and asked farmers about their crops. He participated in conversations about Jesus Christ.He watched life happen.As he watched, Ben saw how a simple coffee cooperative could transform lives. He compared the communities where farmers worked with “Cultivadores del Reino,” or “Kingdom Growers,” to communities where they didn’t. He found a vast difference.“Economic development through trade was pretty evident,” he remembered.Villages associated with the cooperative had greater income and food security because Cultivadores del Reino offered the market access and agricultural training needed to succeed in the coffee business. They had more churches because the cooperative had planted them. And, they had better access to education because they could afford to build more schools and hire more teachers.In contrast, Ben saw that farmers in the poorest villages had few partners upon whom to rely. Isolation served as a major contributor to poverty. Cultivadores del Reino, however, created community partnerships that boosted the income of its members while spreading the Gospel.As a man with a degree in economics and a desire to watch people fall in love with Jesus, Ben had felt called. In fact, he felt so passionate about Kingdom Growers, the cooperative’s partner in the United States, he worked his first year for the company without pay.“There’s more than just working and living and dying,” he explains. “There’s an impact to be made."Now, after four years with Kingdom Growers, Ben has combined his passion for economics with his passion for the Gospel. As an employee, he has supported our mission by performing logistical work, accounting, administrative duties and more for us. We couldn’t make coffee without him.Through Kingdom Growers, Ben gets to affect people around the world—especially in those villages he visited in 2014. Every day he steps into our warehouse in Forney, Texas, he makes physical and spiritual impacts on farming communities around the world.