Amanda Eastwood Chávez (B.A. ’05, M.P.H. ’11) knows what she wants—and how to go after it. For instance, after a service trip to Mexico in high school, she knew she wanted to move to Latin America one day.

A few years later, the Shoreview, Minnesota native applied to the U of M but was rejected. Undeterred, she tried again a year later. Another rejection.

“I got on the phone and found someone at admissions,” she recalls. “I said, ‘I’m Amanda Eastwood and this is my application number. But I’m calling to talk to you as a person and say you’d be proud to have me at your university. I’m the kind of person that you want on your team.’”

Her gambit worked, and Eastwood Chávez was in. It also marked the beginning of a career that has taken her to Mexico, Nicaragua, Tanzania, Costa Rica, and the United Kingdom.

Today, she’s living in Lima, Peru, with her Venezuelan-born husband, Javier, and twin babies. She’s also working as the head of strategic partnerships for M-Cultivo, a company that provides digital tools to make the coffee supply chain more equitable. The unpredictability of the coffee bean crop due to weather—and accelerated by climate change—can make it tough for coffee farmers to make a living. Nearly half of the world’s coffee farmers live in poverty.

The coffee industry proved to be the perfect match for Eastwood Chávez to fulfill the motto she’s lived by since she was a teenager: “To educate, inform, and empower those around me to go forth and succeed.”

After her first trip to Mexico at 15, Eastwood Chávez threw herself into learning Spanish fluently. She started dancing salsa three nights a week. At the U of M, where she double-majored in Spanish and global studies, she studied abroad in Venezuela, volunteered at a Hispanic family center in the Twin Cities, and advocated for the DREAM Act through one of her classes. She also cultivated an interest in women’s health on a summer trip to Ciudad Júarez in northern Mexico, where she volunteered with a nonprofit.

A few months after she graduated in 2005, Eastwood Chávez got a job as a sales representative for Cafe Imports, a green coffee importing company headquartered in Minneapolis. Trying to find a way to combine her job with her other interests, one day she Googled “coffee, women’s health, volunteer” and came across a nonprofit called Grounds for Health, which provides women’s health programs in coffee communities. She immediately picked up the phone to call the executive director, who invited her to volunteer with them in Nicaragua for a couple of weeks.

“While I was there, I remember seeing my future flash before my eyes,” Eastwood Chávez says. “I was at a really low-resource clinic in a small developing community, and we were working on cervical cancer prevention and early treatment.”

The executive director offered her an opportunity: “Go get your master’s in public health and come work for me.” Soon, Eastwood Chávez was back at the U of M.

In graduate school, Eastwood Chávez took classes on reproductive and global health with professors like Wendy Hellerstedt, at the time an associate professor in the School of Public Health’s Department of Epidemiology and Community Health, and Charles Oberg, M.D., who was director of the Maternal and Child Health program. She recalls them infusing lessons with compassion and empathy. For her master’s thesis, Eastwood Chávez returned to Mexico—this time Chiapas near the Guatemalan border—and worked with Grounds for Health studying early cervical cancer detection using white vinegar, a low-cost, accessible alternative to more expensive tests.

Eastwood Chávez realized that working on the business side of the coffee industry could enable her to make the most impact. “What do these communities need? They need access to health services and education and road transportation and all of these different things that public health focuses on,” she says. “But in order to have all of these things, first they need economic prosperity.”

Eastwood Chávez worked for several different import and export companies as a liaison between the coffee-growing communities and the companies. She still uses her personal motto as guidance in her work. Amid climate change, which has impacted some of the major coffee-growing regions at faster rates than other parts of the world, the stakes are even higher. But Eastwood Chávez sees the crisis as an opportunity for coffee growers to raise their voices.

“The tables are turning,” Eastwood Chávez says. “Older farmers are aging out of coffee farming and younger people are seeing it as a loser’s game. The dynamics are shifting, so if you are a buyer and you want a sustainable product with longevity, you have to invest in these communities and you have to pay the right prices. It’s got to be an equitable business.”

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