Cooperative Lending Program

The program came to On the Ground in 2025, when board member Father Wayne Dziekan brought the lending work he launched in 2022 — with roughly $200,000 of his own funds — under the organization's management. Bringing it into OTG added capacity, accountability, monitoring, and compliance, and ensured the project would outlive its founder.

Most of the lending takes the form of pre-finance loans. A pre-finance loan lets a cooperative pay its member farmers immediately upon delivery of their harvest, rather than making families wait up to six months for international buyers to pay the cooperative. Immediate payment means food, school supplies, and clothing when they are needed, not after the season has passed.

Father Wayne calls these Solidarity Loans, because their goal is not profit. Most are tripartite legal agreements tied to specific coffee contracts, which substantially increases the likelihood of repayment. When crop failure, war, or natural disaster delays repayment, the burden is usually not passed to farmers: in approved cases On the Ground shares the hardship through lost interest income.

On the Ground is well placed to run this work because of its board representation from Cooperative Coffees, a cooperative of 22 fair trade coffee buyers across the United States and Canada, which helps identify the cooperatives most in need of pre-financing.