Clark Host Entrepreneurs Event Focuses on Failure and Resiliency

Monday, March 12, 2012

GoLocalWorcester News Team

Clark University’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program will host successful Massachusetts entrepreneur Dean Cycon as the keynote speaker at an interactive event, “The World is Yours: Failure and Resiliency,” this week. Cycon will talk about the highs and lows of starting his business.

Cycon is the Founder and CEO of Dean’s Beans Organic Coffee Company, a certified 100% organic, fair trade and kosher coffee roasting operation in Orange, Mass. He has over 30 years of development work and activism in indigenous communities, including coffee villages, in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Cycon is co-founder of Coffee Kids (non-profit development group), and of Cooperative Coffees, the world’s first fair trade roaster’s cooperative. He has been a Woods Hole Research Fellow, a Senior Fulbright Scholar, and a Yale Law School Visiting Fellow. Cycon created Dean’s Beans to prove that business can promote positive economic, social and environmental change at the third world source, and be profitable at the same time. His book about social justice, culture and coffee, “Javatrekker: Dispatches from the World of Fair Trade Coffee,” won the Gold Medal as the Best Travel Essay Book of 2008 from the Independent Publishers Association.

Dean’s Beans has grown steadily over the past 17 years and has stayed on its mission. The company designs and funds people-centered development projects in the coffee lands in partnership with the growers, and returns a percentage of profits to the growers as a Social Equity Premium. The company has received a Best Practices Recognition from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the 2004 Sustainability Award from the Specialty Coffee Association of America, and numerous other recognitions for the quality of its products and the success of its social mission.

The event will also offer attendees a chance to network with the following local entrepreneurs:
Shari Worthington, president, Telesian Technology
Alicia Williams, Internet marketing specialist, Aliste Events: Bringing Business to Life
Jacqueline Dube, owner, Jacqueline Jase Face & Body Center, LLC
Monica Hamel, chief creative officer, Expressions of You
Scott Newman, President and CEO, US Markerboard
Russ Haims, principal, Hampton Properties LLC & Haims Investment Group, Inc.
David Roth, Founder and Chief Innovative Officer, 4TheCauseMarketing
Ceri Ruenheck, owner, itsyourcall
Steve Rothschild, CEO, Applied Interactive (Rothschild is also an I&E Entrepreneur In Residence and a capstone instructor),
Dee Wells, host, Obsessive Sneaker Disorder Radio Show (OSD live), and
Cindy Testa, owner, Bookkeeping Express.

The event is on Friday, March 16, in Clark University’s Dana Commons, 2nd floor, from 4-7 p.m.