In case you missed the huge news last week - we opened our very own pop up shop at The Old Truman Brewery for 6 whole days of REAL tea and daily workshops all in an effort to raise some additional funds for our ethical scheme.

The goal? Raise £4,000 for The Point Foundation.

The goal we were all secretly aiming for? Raise £5,000! (more on that later)

How hard could it be?!

For anyone not familiar, the teapigs ethical scheme is our way of giving back to the communities that bring us our tea and a core part of life here at teapigs. For the past 10 years, we’ve worked closely with a wonderful charity called The Point Foundation, who support vulnerable members of the tea growing community in Rwanda, by championing education. 

Through on pack donations of our everyday brew, we currently fully fund teapigs house, sponsor students through school and University and provide school uniforms and text books for a local school in Gisenyi. So far we’ve donated a whopping £200,000 - but we were keen to find out whether there was a specific project we could support with all sales from the shop. 

Following a chat with Karen & Charles (point foundation co-founders and all round amazing humans), we knew exactly how our money could best be spent - they had just started looking for donors to help support a new project in Mwogo, Bugesera – one of the poorest regions in Rwanda. As part of the Mwogo development plan, Point Foundation aim to open a Vocational Training Centre by January 2019 – the centre will train vulnerable youngsters in valuable skills such as mechanics, tailoring, hairdressing and plumbing. Armed with these skills, they will be able to gain skilled jobs and raise themselves out of poverty.

Now, granted we're not builders, when Karen informed us that £5,000 would fully cover the cost of setting up this centre, we were pretty blown away with how little it actually was. 

As our initial goal was already £4,000 it was a complete no brainer to aim for the £5,000 instead (but you know, the boards with the original target had already been printed at that point)

Skip to 6 days, 106 cups of tea, 957 packs of tea and 120 doughnuts later, we are absolutely THRILLED to say with a mere ten minutes to go before shutting up shop for good – we hit £5,000!!

So much hard work went in to the pop up, and to see the amazing response the shop had was simply mind blowing. Thanks so much to everyone that visited, or told your friends about us and trust us when we say that £5k is going to make such a difference to the communities in Rwanda. We’ll keep you updated with the Mwogo project every step of the way. 

If you didn’t manage to make it to the shop, but would like to contribute towards The Point Foundation’s amazing work – simply buy yourself a pack of our everyday brew, as the donation will be made automatically for you. Alternatively, you can donate directly online next time you shop with us. 

Now, onto the next one! 

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