Excerpted from "Latte and Laughter" by  Nicole Johnson:

Coffee is a universal welcome. It is available to all of us, rich or poor. It doesn't matter what country you live in, what language you speak - you can get a cup of coffee without much trouble. I have had a coffee in almost all fifty states and in eleven countries. I have friends who have sipped cups in England and others who have been served coffee sitting in a grass hut in the desert of Oman. The message is always the same: friendship and warmth. You are welcome here.

Coffee is an experience, an offer, a rite of passage, a good excuse to get together. When someone invites you to get coffee, it isn't because they're thirsty. It might be because they are cold, but more than likely it is because they want to spend time with you. Coffee makes a promise.

People who don't even like coffee usually love the smell and the experience. I have friends who don't drink coffee, but they never pass up the opportunity to go to get some. It's the place, the people, and the passion. They will have hot chocolate or a smoothie or some beverage, just to embrace the invitation to get together.

And that is the invitation of this book. We want to spend time with you. We'd like to get together over a cup of cappuccino or a cafe latte and share a few thoughts on friends and fun, family and faith. The way I see it, you don't need an excuse to get together over coffee, but this is one of the best.

People across the world are invited to creatively express what fair trade means to them through words, video, images, music, and other media in the I Love Fair Trade! contest presented by Alter Eco, Indigenous Designs, Ode Magazine, and Your Olive Branch.

The contest winner will receive $2,000 worth of Fair Trade goods, including organic clothing, artisan chocolate, fair trade coffee, and more.

Click here for more information.

Multinational coffee companies now rule our shopping malls and supermarkets and dominate the industry worth over $80 billion, making coffee the most valuable trading commodity in the world after oil.

But while we continue to pay for our lattes and cappuccinos, the price paid to coffee farmers remains so low that many have been forced to abandon their coffee fields.

Click here for the Black Gold Website.

As westerners revel in designer lattes and cappuccinos, impoverished Ethiopian coffee growers suffer the bitter taste of injustice. In this eye-opening expose of the multi-billion dollar industry, Black Gold traces one man's fight for a fair price.

Watch the illuminating movie right here.

Janet Nukubana has spent the week far away from her native Rwanda in and effort to spread an important message in Denver.

The co-founder of Gahya Links, a for-profit Rwandan handicraft company, spoke to a group organized by the locally-based company Trading 4 Treasures.

Nukubana's company offers Rwandan women economic empowerment through fair-trade, a concept that cuts out the middle man and allows the women to make goods such as beaded necklaces and woven baskets to gain 100 percent of the profit from the sales of their goods.

It often leads to independence and an escape from poverty for the women, who are still suffering the side-effects of the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

Click here for the story.

Click here for the story.

For the next three days, more than 6,000 leaders from the corporate, nonprofit and public sectors will gather in New York City to develop strategies on how we can collaborate to strengthen our communities through volunteerism. The National Conference on Volunteering and Service is the largest gathering of volunteer leaders from across the country. It will be a time to learn, connect and explore how companies, nonprofits and government officials can make our volunteer programs more effective and valuable to the neighborhoods in which we live and work.

Click here for the story.

It has become increasingly clear that these extraordinary areas face an insidious threat in climate change. Climate change is disrupting agriculture patterns and will continue to foster unpredictable harvests across the world. There will be significant impacts on both the livelihoods of coffee farmers and the broader environment.

Click here for more.

The risk of some cancers may be cut by drinking coffee. Research presented at the 2009 American Association for Cancer Research Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research Conference showed that coffee cut male coffee drinkers' risk of aggressive prostate cancer by 60 percent, based on a 20-year study of 50,000 men.

And people who drink coffee reduce their risk of developing liver cancer by 41 percent, compared to people who never drink coffee, according to a study in the journal Hepatology. The researchers theorized that compounds found in coffee may block the action of enzymes involved in detoxifying carcinogenic compounds that may lead to liver cancer, the third largest cause of cancer deaths around the world, after lung and stomach cancer.

Click here for the story.

The Great Recession is challenging all of America, but perhaps especially our schools. To thrive today organizations must think in new ways to meet budget shortfalls. We help you do this in a positive way.

From the WSJ:

State governments generally try to spare schools from budget cuts. But the recession hit tax revenue so hard that K-12 education is seeing sharp cutbacks in state funding.

All major sources of state and local-government revenue—sales taxes, income taxes and property taxes—have fallen. Property taxes are the primary source of school funding, and home values have dropped sharply, particularly on the coasts. More taxpayers are appealing their property assessments to lower their bills.

Click here for the story.