our people

Braden Diego Wilson: Steamboat Springs, Colorado

Braden Diego Wilson currently teaches Spanish to middle school students in the mountain town of Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Braden has spent the better part of the past decade working on community development and public health projects in the Central American countries of Nicaragua, Panama, and his beloved Costa Rica.  The idea for a coffee project surfaced in 2007 during a community meeting in the small community of Cedral, Costa Rica. Since then, Braden has brought numerous middle and high school volunteer groups to Central America on a yearly basis to work alongside farmers assisting them in the construction of a micro-mill coffee processing facility. The inception of El Puente Coffee was rooted in the economic and social injustices that hard working coffee farmers face in a very exploitative international market. The idea was to form a true partnership of social entrepreneurship to empower farmers to take control of a process that had traditionally been designed around exclusion. Wilson is the proud father of Isabel, and he is an avid mountain biker, skier, and surfer who feels equally at home trudging through coffee fields as he does when pursing his passions in the mountains or on the water. 

Rodolfo Valverde: Piedades, Costa Rica

I was born in 1966 and I came from a large family of 7 siblings. Since I was 5 years old I remember my father working his small lot of coffee beside our house. My father was a carpenter and my mother was a seamstress. When I was 7, my father had an opportunity to work on one of the larger coffee plantations in the region. Thanks to this job, combined with my mother’s seamstress work, 3 of my brothers and I were able to go to school, a great accomplishment, considering that at this time it was difficult for people from the countryside to have an opportunity to study. I graduated from high school in 1984 and in 1985 I began working in the Montero coffee plantation. At 22, I married Maria Eugenia Fallas Duran, an exceptional woman. God gave us an amazing gift of 4 wonderful children. Kimberly, who at 25 graduated from college and is now working, Jennifer who is married and attending college, Melanie who is studying in college, and Jose who is finishing high school.  In 1998, God provided us the opportunity to acquire a small farm of 5 hectares, located in Costa Rica’s Central Valley in the community of Piedades. This was a working coffee farm which allowed me to enjoy being the owner of my own farm. Since I was a child, my father taught me that the cultivation of coffee is for hardworking people and that the costs of production are very high, and that farmers have no control over international market prices, this being the most important factor. In actuality, due to climate change, threats of disease to coffee plants have increased making coffee more vulnerable and difficult to maintain than ever before. We have had to adapt and reinvent our business, combining it with rural tourism and we have named our farm Finca Integral Doña Rosa. We process coffee in an artisan style, incorporating traditional methods of processing, especially sun drying, which has allowed us to expand into a different market. With faith in God, we hope to be able to continue down this difficult but marvelous path of coffee cultivation, which has for the past 40 years, allowed me to grow and shaped me as a person.

COOPE CEDRAL: Cedral de Cajón, Costa Rica

The southern highland community of Cedral de Cajón was founded roughly 50 years ago by farmers coming from the famed Los Santos region of central Costa Rica. Los Santos has long produced world renowned coffee and the settlers of Cedral brought this knowledge of coffee cultivation with them across the mountains. In 1996, community members founded Asociación de Productores de Cedral (ASOPROCE) to represent agricultural interests in the community. Gradually, the association shifted their interests from dairy production to a singular focus on coffee and the dream of the construction of a small micro-mill coffee facility (beneficio) soon followed. Traditionally, the community had sold their high altitude coffee to massive local mills at very low prices only to have their artisan coffee mixed in with inferior beans from lower altitudes. The farmers of Cedral wanted to differentiate their coffee from the other producers in the region and projects assisted by student volunteer groups laid the groundwork for the construction of a mico-mill in the community. The eventual establishment of the micro-beneficio Los Jilgueros was spearheaded by visionary brothers, Donal and Froilan Diaz, and the ownership of a local mill ensured that the specialty coffee from Cedral could be preserved, processed by hand, and controlled locally in order to garner a better price for an exquisite coffee. ASOPROCE has since evolved into COOPE CEDRAL and the small co-op is comprised of approximately ten families who plant, harvest, and process outstanding coffees following strict environmental guidelines to guarantee consistency and quality in each micro coffee lot.