Climate change continues to hit farmers around the world hard. Floods caused by unusual rain patterns have severely damaged many farmers in Western Uganda and Congo earlier this year. Bukonzo Joint Cooperative Union (BJCU) from Western Uganda is among the affected. Bukonzo Joint has been setting the standards for both coffee quality and coffee cooperative management in Western Uganda for a decade. They began as a rural micro-finance society in 1996 and have grown into a Union with 5,500 farmers and 72 producer groups. The benefits of producing high-quality coffee was embraced by most of the members quickly and now the Union has 20 micro-washing stations that produce some of the best coffee in Uganda. Atlas Coffee Importers has been partnering with Bukonzo Joint for a decade. Two groups worked closely to set up BJCU’s Quality Control lab in 2015 and Drew Billups personally trained the lab staff. It didn’t take much for BJCU to find their element, and to become an inclusive farmers cooperative. They developed pictorial presentations of the practices at the washing station so the illiterate farmers are also included in the communication. The same year they founded their QC lab, they also implemented an inclusive methodology to run the cooperative: Gender Action Learning System. This method ensures not only equal participation of women and men in the decision-making process but also in deciding the long-term goals for the group. Having established their QC lab and their inclusive management method, BJCU and Atlas Coffee partnered up to organize cupping competitions in Uganda to acknowledge the cooperative’s quality coffee and present them to the roasters and other buyers. In February, they held the 6th edition of the competition which was done simultaneously in Seattle and Kasese for the first time.