For 45 minutes twice a week, a neighborhood café in West Hills serves coffee, cocoa and fruit smoothies to early morning commuters.

Though the "neighborhood" is the campus of Chaminade College Preparatory and the commuters are high school faculty, students and parents, the Higher Grounds Café serving and selling coffee from fair-trade unions in Ethiopia and Peru has become a successful non-profit business venture.

So successful in sales and market growth potential, in fact, it drew the attention of Ethiopian Tadesse Meskela, general manager of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Societies Union representing nearly 129,000 Ethiopian farmer households.

Since 2001, when OCFCSU farmers first started selling and exporting fair-trade coffee to markets that grew to include Australia, Canada, Europe, Japan and the U.S., approximately $5 million in profits has been shared with the growers, allowing them to build 15 schools and five health centers.

After reading about Chaminade's fair-trade coffee business on the Internet, Meskela decided to visit the café recently in person because, as the first student-run U.S. retail brewery outlet selling the cooperative's coffee, the school is doing things that are "very important for Oromia."

During his visit to Chaminade Feb. 22, Meskela explained that, while roasters in Northern California, Michigan and Massachuettes have been importing fair-trade coffee beans for a few years from OCFCSU, Higher Grounds Café is among only a very few U.S. brewers selling coffee drinks directly to customers.

Interestingly, the fair-trade café, a project of Chaminade's Future Business Leaders of America Club moderated by business economics teacher, Aron Gideon, came about because a former FBLA business venture selling snack food to students failed due to lackluster sales.

Inspired by a campus screening of "Black Gold," a 2006 critically-acclaimed British documentary centered on Meskela's efforts to improve Oromia farmers' income by selling their coffee for higher prices and maintaining the quality and sustainability of coffee production, FBLA students decided to open Higher Grounds Café last October.

"I appreciate the students' dedication to help the growers down in our country, one of the poorest countries in the world," said Meskela during his Chaminade visit on an overcast, rainy spring morning.

Undeterred by the weather, Chaminade senior and Higher Grounds saleswoman, Morgan Marchionda, had been standing near the curb of the student drop-off location since 7 a.m. holding a giant arrow pointing to the café located in a room at the end of a classroom building. The café's sales for its 45-minute "day" totaled an impressive $270 which Meskela called "amazing.'

"I really want to help the farmers," said Marchionda, who plans a college major in business and hopes to become an entrepreneur. "I think it's beautiful that Meskela is trying to help and better people's lives," she added. Fellow senior, Austin English, who manages the café, explained his participation this way: "It's great to do something good."

"I'm sure these students in school now will do good for the poor," explained Meskela. "I've visited schools and universities many times, and I've seen that Americans care, the only thing is, they don't have any information where the production [of food] comes from. Coffee, tea and bananas --- most comes from poor growers."

He travels the world encouraging communities to participate in "fair-trade," a social movement and market-based model for global trade that promotes the payment of a fair price for goods. Noting that the United Kingdom has 115 fair-trade products, Meskela commented: "The same thing has to happen here."

Recently, Chaminade decided to boost its support by discontinuing its outside coffee service and exclusively brewing fair-trade coffee. A few months ago, both Chaminade's high school and middle school in Chatsworth received their shipments of five-pound bags of "Ethiopian Elevation."

"That's going to be a way for us, not just to support this cause, but to use ourselves as an example," said Gideon. His FBLA students have made presentations to local businesses about switching to fair-trade coffee in the workplace. On June 4, the students are scheduled to make a presentation to the Woodland Hills Rotary Club.

"We will be challenging businesses to replace coffee in their employee break rooms with the fair-trade coffee that we distribute... For Ethiopia in particular, this is a relatively untapped market," said Gideon.

He announced during Meskela's visit that FBLA and OCFCSU hope to form a partnership, consolidating future coffee purchases from one of the union's 35 coffee cooperatives in order to measure the economic and environmental impact Chaminade is having on a specific community.

"That's very exciting to us. That's one of our big, very audacious goals, to bring even more meaning to the students and the community so we can see the faces and names of the people of this project," explained Gideon.

Meskela, who described himself as a born-again Pentecostal, says his wife and five teenage and young adult children approve of his long trips away from home to improve the lives of his fellow Ethiopians. In fact, his daughter, Yulia, will be a 10th grade student at Chaminade this fall and intends to volunteer at the Higher Grounds café.

"God has given us a soul to think for the poor," said Meskela. "I am committed to bring change to the community."