About UK Coffee Week

UK Coffee Week aims to celebrate all things coffee while raising funds for coffee-growing communities. It is the nation’s biggest celebration of coffee with hundreds of coffee shops, roasters, restaurants and retailers coming together to give back to those that grow the beans for the drink we all love.  It has been 13 years since the campaign began and it has seen over 400 participating coffee operators join in the fundraising.

Coffee Week is a platform for people to showcase their coffee and where it comes from. It allows us to draw attention to the people that work so hard to bring us the beautiful brews we drink everyday.

This year Mainstreet are joining in to help make sure there is not only good coffee for all but also trying to make sure there is clean water for all. By taking part in this year’s Coffee Week we will be helping to raise funds for Project Waterfall, a charity bringing clean drinking water to coffee growing communities and working to end the water crisis in our lifetime.

Our bakers have been busy baking coffee themed cakes (including this Coffee & Biscoff cake made by Jackie that is pictured below) and all the proceeds from these will be going directly to Project Waterfall. We also have donation jars at the café and deli tills that customers are able to donate into. If you visit us at any point throughout the week, and are able to give, these will be you best way to do so.

This year, funds raised will support a project in the Bugesera district of Rwanda which will reach over 46,000+ people with clean drinking water and sanitisation. 34% of people in Rwanda do not have clean water close to their homes and 1.6 million people every year die from water related diseases. The villages of Mwogo and Jura are largely populated by farmers who work the land for their livelihood and the community walks hours every day to collect their water from the nearest lakes. However, this project will build a new distribution network, piping water from Lake Akagera through an existing treatment plant and then to new reservoirs and water pump stations in each of the villages.

About Project Waterfall

703 million people around the world do not have access to clean water. The vast majority of these people are from isolated and rural areas, often the same areas where coffee is grown. Project Waterfall raises funds to provide clean water, sanitisation and education to coffee growing communities across the globe.

While in the UK we enjoy the purest filtered water in our coffee, the communities growing our coffee beans at the end of its supply chain suffer a water crisis.  Project Waterfall’s mission is to bring together the coffee industry and coffee consumers to give back to these communities in need.

Since 2011, the charity have raised over £1 million and helped change the lives of more than 80,000 people in Nicaragua, Tanzania, Rwanda, Vietnam, Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia.

By bringing clean water to villages and rural areas, project Waterfall are able to build stronger communities and empower women and children. In coffee-growing communities, water collecting is a woman’s job. Often, the journey to collect water can be 8 hours long and, on average, the weight of the water comes in at 20 kilos. This can lead to spinal injuries, pelvic problems, and miscarriages. By removing these journeys, it helps to tackle some of the inequality and by removing the hours of travel to collect water it allows them to go to attend school.