For Just Coffee Cooperative, the name does not quite say it all.

The names of the coffee varieties this Madison-based cooperative produces — from revolution and solidarity roast to Ugandan pride — reveal inklings of its activist mission.

Matthew Earley, who founded the cooperative along with Mike Moon after beginning graduate school at University of Wisconsin, traces his coffee roots back to his time as an undergraduate at University of Kentucky. It began when he was building schools for children whose parents fought in the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico.

Working in the highland regions of northern Mexico, Earley soon found himself working alongside coffee farmers who he knew could be making more than the paltry $0.25 per pound of coffee they were making at the time.

In a true activist fashion, Earley used his passion of bettering the lives of small scale Mexican coffee growers into a reason to apply to graduate school at UW, where he said he planned to write his thesis on ways these growers could increase earnings.

But his graduate school beginnings soon led to a mission-driven business venture after he and some grad school friends began building a relationship with a Mexican coffee grower cooperative.

The relationship consisted of Earley and Moon soliciting buyers in Madison and Milwaukee who would pay the fair trade price the Mexican cooperative asked for.

As it turns out, Earley and Moon’s failure in this task led them straight through a percolator of securing loans and partnerships into the cup of what would become Just Coffee Cooperative in 2012. The mission of the cooperative at the time was to sell the Mexican cooperative’s beans.

Since then, Just Coffee’s vital stats are a world away from what they were in 2002, though their activist mission has remained the same. Earley said the cooperative is poised to earn over $3 million this year, has expanded its territory to cover 35 states and has increased hiring to include nearly 30 employees.

“None of us are business people,” Earley said. “We all come from a political activist background and wanted this to be an experiment, and it still is, of showing how you can serve more people the right way, but also be successful.”

And believing wholeheartedly in the cooperative model, Just Coffee has joined with 24 other roasters to source coffee and a medium roast coffee flavor from small-scale growers across various countries in Mexico, Central and South America and Africa.

But what becomes clear with Just Coffee, which Earley said originally built up its foundation after attending farmers markets and political protests, is its dedication to the political realm.

“We have always been a lot louder about our politics and beliefs than other businesses, instead of trying to always remain neutral and say business and politics are separate,” Earley said. “We all know that’s not true.”

Given Just Coffee’s unique mash-up of business and politics, Earley said it became vital that the cooperative hold high a banner of transparency, going so far as to post profit and loss statements along with contracts right on their website.

“If we recognize the world and governments are influenced heavily by business, we want to provide a model for a transparent business,” Earley said.

Throughout the years, Earley said the cooperative has been involved in campaigns supporting the LGBTQ community and Zapatista movement. The cooperative also helps farmer groups and other groups politically aligned with Just Coffee’s members.

Earley is even a board member of the non-profit On the Ground, which supports sustainable community development in agricultural regions worldwide through promoting water projects, gender equality, school building. The nonprofit also helps with recovery from roya, a fungus blighting coffee crops especially in Latin American countries.

The roya epidemic has unfortunately led to many of the coffee growers Just Coffee relies on to become unable to meet demand. Earley said one particular operation in El Salvador could barely meet 20 percent of its usual production. So Just Coffee took it on as yet another subject of activism.

Because Earley said climate change has contributed to the spread of roya, as well as more volatile weather conditions in Latin America, he said he sees Just Coffee expanding its reach to help diversify the economies of the areas most affected.

But while politics has always been an inherent component of Just Coffee’s mission, Earley said with a new generation of coffee connoisseurs coming of age, the cooperative has had to make some adjustments. Because these new coffee drinkers seem to be focused on taste just as much as on activism, Earley said the cooperative has worked hard to perfect coffee flavor.

“Coffee has always been the vehicle for what we want to do, but now it might be that artisanal flair is first and politics second,” Earley said.