Working at Enveritas
Do you want to work for a mission-driven non-profit, working to improve the livelihoods of coffee farmers around the world? Enveritas is looking to hire. View our open positions on Greenhouse.
Feel free to contact us at jobs@enveritas.org should you have any questions about a position or our interview process — we’d love to hear from you. Note that Enveritas has been made aware of fake job postings by individuals pretending to hire persons seeking employment. These individuals are looking to collect personal information for the purpose of perpetrating fraud or stealing your identity. All emails from Enveritas team members will come from @enveritas.org.
Enveritas provides sustainability assurance for the coffee industry. We visit smallholder coffee farms around the world to understand their social, economic, and environmental practices. In 2022, we will visit 50,000 farms across more than 20 countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. We work with leading coffee roasters to understand the sustainability issues in their supply chain based on our sustainability standards .
We value impact, innovation, integrity, collegiality, and humility . Everything we work on is in service of our mission: gaining a deeper understanding of today’s most pressing sustainability challenges and helping the poorest coffee farmers out of poverty. Having such a clear mission makes the work we do meaningful and rewarding, and that makes being a part of the team immensely satisfying.
Keep reading to learn more about who we are and what it’s like to work at Enveritas, or click to jump to a specific section:
Who We Are
Mary, a smallholder farmer in the Bukomansimbi District of Uganda, being interviewed by an Enveritas surveyor. She participated in an Enveritas-led pest and disease training program.
We’re a ~65 person non-profit organization dedicated to the mission of getting smallholder farmers out of poverty. Our Ops Teams are based around the world, split into two main teams (Africa/Asia and the Americas). Our other teams — Data & Engineering, Partnerships, and Admin — are distributed, with many members based in the United States.
All of our teams are responsible for learning about and communicating the sustainability issues faced by coffee growers. We primarily focus on smallholder coffee farmers: family-run farms that are 5 hectares (~12 acres) or less and who make up 95% of the estimated 12.5 million farms selling coffee on the international market today. Our work involves understanding the social, environmental, and economic issues affecting them. The insights we gather are then used by partners to assist these communities in improving their livelihoods.
| Enveritas by the Numbers | |
|---|---|
| Number of countries we live in | 22 |
| Number of timezones we live in | 11 |
| Number of languages spoken | 20 |
| Percent of staff who drink coffee | 95% |
| Percent of staff who add milk to their coffee | 25% |
Our core insights come from our universal survey, managed by our Ops Team, in which we ask farmers questions about what life is like for them. Do they have access to clean water? Are their children able to attend school? Are local labor laws being followed? Questions like these allow us to create the most detailed global assessment ever created about coffee growers.
We’re proud of our real-time data collection system, built by our Data & Engineering Team . For our surveys, we use Android phones that sync to our own technology platform, which is constantly scanning for inconsistencies and typos. Behind the scenes, we use machine learning for detecting land usage patterns, from crop type to deforestation events. With over 50,000 surveys done each year, our technology enables us to gather and review data in ways previously unimaginable, ensuring the highest level of accuracy.
Our work enables us to understand what issues are prevalent, and where. Using these insights, our Partnerships Team guides partners, including coffee roasters, as to what types of programs and assistance are most beneficial to a region’s coffee growers, all with a goal of improving their livelihoods.
And finally, our Admin Team is responsible for maintaining our ability, as a non-profit, to achieve all of this. International finance, people operations, and contract management are all critical parts to keeping our work on track.
Our Field Work
The start of survey work in Nicaragua on December 4, 2021.
There’s a lot more to our work than simply asking a farmer a bunch of questions. To start with, how would you know where to find a farm? There’s no global directory of coffee farmers! We solve this problem by running a machine learning model over satellite imagery, predicting where we can find coffee farmers, and then validating the list of predicted points with field visits. To gather our surveys, we randomly pick starting points — GPS coordinates of where we think we’ll find a farmer — and we send our surveyors to those locations.
It’s incredibly challenging work. Even with the aid of the partners that we work with in each country, who know the local terrains, customs, and culture, we’ve faced every imaginable obstacle and then some to get to our starting points. Our partner teams have floated vans over rivers when there are no bridges. They’ve hiked miles into mountains to see farms. Hurricanes have washed away roads; volcanoes have spewed ash; pandemics have challenged the normal routines. And we have to overcome all of these so that we can learn, from first-hand observations, what working conditions are like on a farm.
We make a point of doing our coffee survey work during the coffee harvest, meaning that we visit farms during periods when we can actively observe the working conditions and see farming practices as they happen. Our survey captures more than responses; we observe labor practices, agronomy details, and health and safety processes on the farms we visit.
Getting to a starting point isn’t always easy!
In addition to our surveys with coffee farmers, we also engage in research projects related to smallholder farmers. We’ve done projects on deforestation, on pests like coffee berry borer, and on education infrastructure and literacy. Regardless of the topic, we are constantly reviewing the ways we work and improving the methods we use for generating insights. In this photo, our team in Uganda is listening to one of our team members, Raphael. He’s sharing proposals for ways to refine our workflow, in this case for research done with International Food Policy Research Institute on a project for estimating plant yield by weighing ripe coffee cherries.
We also experiment with new technologies that might enable us to learn more about issues that impact farmers. For example, we’ve piloted rapid soil tests in partnership with Microbiometer to understand soil health and microorganisms in the soil. Soil health is a key factor for crop health. Can we learn what factors exist in certain regions that, if addressed, would help the farmer increase their yield? We’re always thinking about ways to capture more information, from which we can determine better insights to help farmers.
One of our enumerators, Ana Paula, testing soil health in the Alta Mogiana coffee region of Brazil.
We’re a collegiate bunch who genuinely enjoy supporting each other. This photo captures a lunchtime break where our Central America Ops Team was celebrating a birthday. Regardless of whether the team you’re looking to join is based in the field or at a desk, every one of us is inspired to find ways of making life better for others. Working at Enveritas is an amazing opportunity to understand more of the world and learn about many different cultures.
Sharing Our Insights
For Enveritas to succeed at improving the lives of smallholder farmers, we need to do much more than gather data. We measure thirty different criteria covering topics like access to clean water, soil conservation, and standards of living (see our Standards Library for full details). Based on these criteria, we’re able to generate insights that show where issues are prevalent. Simply knowing where certain issues are likely to be occurring is critical for the success of projects. Our insights provide a census-style map of the coffee-growing world that shows exactly that.
We share our findings with a range of stakeholders, including at conferences, in articles, and with the general coffee community. We work especially closely with coffee roasters, who pay for our assessments. These relationships allow us to fund our work without charging coffee farmers, most of whom could not afford the cost of traditional sustainability certification assessment.
Our partners — primarily coffee roasters — implement projects to improve sustainable practices and raise farmer livelihoods based on our assessments. These projects cover a broad range of topics, but all are related to ensuring that farmers have a long-term sustainable future. Here are some of the impactful projects we’ve helped catalyze (for more examples, view our Impact page).
- Colombia: training on pruning and rejuvenation practices to increase farmer incomes
- Guatemala: supporting child care centers and kindergartens for children of farmers and farm workers
- Nicaragua : improving school infrastructure
- Sumatra, Indonesia: providing trainings on safe pesticide handling and on soil improvement practices
- Uganda: enabling agronomy training for smallholder coffee farms to increase incomes
- Vietnam : teaching water conservation practices for smallholder coffee farms
There is still much to learn about smallholder coffee farmers. We’re constantly learning and researching on areas related to coffee and smallholder farmers in other crops as well.
David, our CEO, giving a talk about coffee myths and seeking the truth.
Learning and Professional Development
Working at Enveritas means constantly learning new things; we’re always innovating on how we do our work and what topics we’re investigating. Learning and professional development take a couple of different shapes at Enveritas: beyond the work itself, we provide a professional development budget for all staff and provide opportunities for staff whose jobs aren’t based in the field to visit coffee origins. These field visits allow our staff to see what life is like for coffee farmers and to learn how our Ops Teams operate. These trips create a richer understanding of why the work we do is so important.
As a company, we also organize an annual retreat, allowing us to get together and learn from each other on a variety of topics. (We skipped a few years due to COVID-19.) Prior retreats have included Costa Rica, Ethiopia, and Brazil. Our retreats are especially meaningful — while we’re a remote-first organization, Slack is no substitute for in-person conversation.
During our company trip to Brazil, we stayed at an active coffee cooperative — here we are with some of the farmers involved.
Getting together also allows us to learn about coffee, the beverage! This photo shows one of our engineers, Grace, at a coffee cupping we did in Ethiopia. But don’t worry if you don’t like to drink coffee — we do have staff who don’t drink it. What does unite us is our passion for improving the world’s understanding of coffee farmers and improving the livelihoods of those farmers.
Interested? Let’s Talk!
Thanks for spending time learning about what working at Enveritas is like.
View our open positions on Greenhouse.
If you have any questions and aren’t ready to apply, send us an email at jobs@enveritas.org. We’re happy to share more and when appropriate set up an informal virtual coffee chat to speak with you. Questions about any of our roles or about our process will not reflect negatively on your application — if you want to learn more but aren’t ready to apply, we really do want to hear from you.
If you don’t see any open positions that match what you’re looking for, we encourage you to send us an email. Tell us about what you’d like to work on and your background — we have hired team members who have contacted us this way.
