FOR BREAKING NEWS VISIT WWW.QNS.COM JANUARY 9, 2020 • QUEENS BUSINESS • THE QUEENS COURIER 27
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Joseph Zoleta is the founder of the Black 6 Project. Photos courtesy of Black 6 Coff ee Trading
Black 6 Project is ‘Mission Driven, Coff ee
Fueled’ by Queens-based military veterans
BY ANGÉLICA ACEVEDO
When Joseph Zoleta and his fellow
paramedic partners began their humanitarian
and disaster relief nonprofi t, Black
6 Project, they didn’t know it would lead
them to coff ee trading.
“I realized that our humanitarian work
has embedded me in the coff ee world,”
said Zoleta, who’s worked as a paramedic
supervisor in Queens since 2016. “Th ey
go hand in hand.”
Black 6 Project is made up of veterans
and volunteers who travel across the
globe to serve remote villages with medical
and food needs. Th ey’ve conducted
numerous humanitarian missions in
the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guatemala
and Colombia, since they began the nonprofi
t in 2017. Just a year ago, though,
they began working with coff ee farmers
in those villages to trade their goods
and roast their coff ee right in Long Island
City.
Zoleta and his network of paramedics,
some of which happen to be military veterans
like him, created the Black 6 Project
out of a passion to help others.
Th e 39-year-old decided to pay homage
to his Marine Corps platoon, the Black
6, when naming the nonprofi t. Aft er witnessing
the collapse of the Twin Towers
from his window on Sept. 11, 2001 — a
moment he considers life-changing for
many reasons including the fact that he
interned at the World Trade Center —
Zoleta joined the Marine Corps.
He experienced two combat tours
in Iraq with the Black 6, and although
his unit was known for its strength, he
remembers some bad losses as well.
“Th ey’re the ones who fought with me,
in the good times and bad times,” Zoleta
said. “So I fi gured what better name to
give my organization than what we
called ourselves on the radio?”
Now, Black 6 Project conducts missions
almost every month. In November, they
fed more than 300 indigenous people in
the Philippines and are currently organizing
another mission to the Bahamas to
provide hurricane disaster relief.
But it was in October of 2017 when
Zoleta was inspired to start Black 6 Coff ee
Trading.
Photo courtesy of Black 6 Coff ee
Trading
At the time, he took a small team with
him to help with search and rescue aft er a
typhoon caused a landslide in Kibungan,
Philippines. During the trip, they stayed
near a coff ee farm — which he thought
was amazing because he didn’t know people
grew coff ee in the Philippines. He also
thought it was a great coincidence considering
he was learning how to roast coff ee
back home in Floral Park.
Zoleta was determined to take some
of the green coff ee to New York City, so
he used his backpack, made by the veteran
owned organization Backpacks for
Life, to carry the 40 pounds of beans up
and down the mountains.
“A few muscle aches later, I got it back
to New York City, and started roasting,”
Zoleta said. “It was just amazing coff ee.”
He emphasizes the trading aspect of
their company so that customers know
they source the coff ee themselves and use
the proceeds to fund the missions they
conduct in those communities.
For instance, part of the proceeds from
their $18 Café Tío Conejo X Black 6
Coff ee blend — which is their fi rst collaboration
with Café Tío Conejo who is
based in Manizales, Colombia — will go
into building a school right on their coffee
farm.
“As a charity, I had so much trouble
funding the missions, but when I realized
we could just use capitalism to fund our
missions, I did,” Zoleta said. “Capitalism
has a bad stigma but when you fl ip it to
create humanitarian work, it makes me
feel better about what I’m doing.”
Born in the Philippines and raised in
Hollis, Queens, Zoleta believes that part
of the beauty of being from the “World’s
Borough” is that he has a vast network of
people he counts on to help him understand
the distinct needs of the countries
they provide humanitarian aid to.
“When I was dreaming of creating this
organization, it really made me realize
that Queens was a prime location for it,
because we all understood and have heard
the ineffi ciencies of government sometimes,”
he said.
And more oft en than not, their team
members are either from or are connected
in some way to the countries they
help, like his best friend and former Navy
corpsman David Guzman, who’s from
Puerto Rico.
“As an outsider, you go there and you
go, ‘Oh, this is what they need,’ but sometimes
they don’t even know how to use
those products. Th ose cultures have also
survived multiple disasters, so they kind
of understand how to bounce back; our
role is just to give them an extra hand if
they need it,” Zoleta said.
Th e Black 6 Project has plans to expand
into a coff ee truck in order to take the coffee
wherever it’s wanted in New York City
and convert it into a disaster relief truck
whenever there’s a natural disaster right
in the U.S. But Zoleta strongly believes
that there are places outside of the U.S.
that deserve their help, too.
“Th ere’s suff ering that happens daily
in countries outside the U.S. … despite
any natural disasters happening, there
are communities out there that need it,”
Zoleta said.
He recounted a recent food drive they
organized for an Indigenous tribe in the
Philippines.
“I was so worried about what we’d feed
them and if they’d like it, ‘Should we put
cilantro in it, would they like cilantro?’”
he said. “But they were starving … Th is
whole village lined up just to eat whatever
was there. Some kids didn’t have shoes,
there were kids that were completely
naked, and they had only one water spout
that wasn’t there two years ago.”
With the support of organizations like
WeWork and Bunker Labs’ Veterans in
Residence program and NYU’s Veterans
Future Lab, Zoleta is able to keep the
Black 6 Project alive.
As a husband and father of a 4-yearold
boy, he’s reminded everyday why his
work is meaningful. Zoleta said he likes
to take his son to missions he feels are
safe, so that he sees “how good he has it
growing up in New York, the biggest city
in the world.”
“When Christmas comes, he’s always
like, ‘Can we bring this to donate?’ and
I’m like, ‘How do you know the word
donate already?’” Zoleta laughed. “And
times when it’s quiet, he always goes,
‘Dad, what’s your mission?’ because he
wants me to say it over and over, because
he loves it. Hopefully, he gets to continue
the work.”
/WWW.QNS.COM
