For 18 UW business students, a cup of coffee is now a lot more meaningful.

During spring break, the students traveled to a remote location deep in the Panamanian jungle to help a local coffee-growing community, while using the business principals they have learned at the Foster School of Business.

“We went on this trip to put our business skills to the test. We wanted to see if what we learned in the business school means anything,” senior Katherine Kleitsch said.

The students forfeited the opportunity to enjoy the luxurious accommodations of typical college spring break destinations to help seven families in San Pedro, Panama cultivate the fruit that produces coffee beans.

The students are members of a group called Global Business Brigades (GBB), a UW club dedicated to helping some of the world’s poorest communities. GBB depends on the intelligence and ingenuity of its members to collaborate with local community members in identifying sustainable tools, training and resources, instead of providing one-time handouts.

It is the difference between “sustainable development” and simply “development,” said senior Vanessa Lopez, GBB program director.

“While visiting Honduras and Panama, I saw a lot of NGO projects that are left half-done or abandoned by the community because an organization will come in with good faith to make a change, but they don’t educate the community on how to replicate what they’ve created or teach them how to use it,” Lopez said. “You’ll see unused buildings or even sewer systems gone bad because the community didn’t understand how to maintain it.”

The only pre-planned part of the trip was the transportation to and from the community and the living arrangements — in an open classroom which was in a building with no closable windows. The students arrived in Panama with no idea as to how they could help the families. The lack of a pre-determined plan was intentional.

“There was no mandatory structure. Because there wasn’t much structure, we could do what was most beneficial to the community,” Lopez said.

Upon interviewing the Panamanian families, the students learned a major coffee company in the region was undercutting the families. The families realized they needed to increase the value of their coffee beans to get a higher return on their coffee.

But without knowledge of business fundamentals, the families were trapped in a cycle they did not know how to escape.

“A per-unit concept of cost was foreign to them. They would sell and buy between different weights. They would refer to units of measurements in terms of buckets; they hadn’t thought about the per-unit cost of the coffee they were selling,” Kleitsch said.

Though the Foster School teaches sound business principles, it does not teach the methodology of rural coffee farming. The students had to learn about the process of coffee farming. During their eight-day immersion, the students worked alongside the families to gain an intimate understanding of their situation.

Besides hauling heavy bags of sand to flatten land, there were also hikes through thick forest with their machete-wielding hosts.

“I have family in Eastern Washington, so my idea of a farm is of trees lined up in rows. They took us into the jungle with machetes and their trees were scattered around the jungle,” Kleitsch said.

The students learned from extensive interviews that the coffee-cultivating process involves four main stages, and the beans can only be sold during the first, second and fourth stages. The beans generate the highest return at the fourth stage, but the families did not have the equipment or the means to reach that step.

The students had neither cell phone reception nor Internet access to conduct research or reference business theories. The quality of their recommendation depended on the collective knowledge of the students.

“We were put in a situation where there was an immediate sense of urgency and a sense of impact,” senior Alex Berg said. “We had to be extremely resourceful. We had to reach down and think outside of the box. It wasn’t just coffee farming. It was coffee farming on this farm, for these people, for this family.”

Many students said that their experience in Panama was the first time they have had the opportunity to apply the lessons learned in classrooms at the UW.

“This experience gave me a deeper understanding of the topics we learned in business school because I could see the people and families who were directly affected by some of the problems we discussed in my classes, and I could connect dots between them and the class discussions. It develops context, but it also grounds you,” Kleitsch said.

After a long, emotional debate over a possible solution to the families’ problems, the students presented them with a proposal and assistance to help them through the first three stages of the process, but told the families they had to determine how they would reach the fourth stage.

“In the end, it was all about collaboration. They ultimately came up with the final solution,” Berg said.

After only eight days in the sweltering humidity of the Panamanian jungle, the students helped the families create their own sustainable plan that will allow them to increase the profit on their beans by 386 percent, with the potential to increase profits to 571 percent within three to five years.

Though the students taught the local families a way that they can realistically escape the cycle of poverty, some of the students said they learned as well, returning with a deeper understanding of the world.

“We really learned more from them than they learned from us. They introduced us to their families. They showed us their farm and their food,” Berg said.

Berg, who has volunteered on mission trips with other service groups, said the GBB trip to Panama stands out from her other experiences.

“This is the first trip I’ve been on where I feel like I’ve made a genuine change. We increased their knowledge and not just capacity on their farm,” she said.

Though the trip was a lot of work, both physically and intellectually, there was some time for reflection.

“I took a minute to step back and look at our situation: We were a group of business students in the jungle,” Berg said. “We were dirty, tired and had this hovering sense of hopelessness, but everyone was trying to make this happen. This was not your typical business school situation.”

Reach reporter Michael Truong at features@dailyuw.com.