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In July 2009, Atlanta café owner, Katrell Christie, returned home from India with a suitcase full of tea and a plan. During her travels, Christie was drawn to mountainous Darjeeling, a region rich in tea—but economically devastated—and it made a big impact on her. There, she visited an impoverished elementary school where 3-9 year-old students, often without adequate clothes or shoes, sit for eight hours a day without a bathroom. She also visited an orphanage where she met a group of girls, who would have nowhere to go upon turning 16. Tuition at Darjeeling University is $500, a manageable amount in the developed world, but a prohibitively expensive cost for these orphans. Going forward the options become increasingly grim for these young women, as they come of age in a part of the world rife with human trafficking.

Committed to improving the situation, Christie came up with a simple plan involving her own community in Atlanta and the region’s most celebrated resource: tea. She would sell her favorite green and black Darjeeling teas and then pour 100 percent of the profits back into helping the at-risk young people who had captured her heart. “I can’t change the world but I can start somewhere” says Christie. “When you’re reaching out and helping young people, you really never know, you may be facilitating the next Mother Theresa or Ghandi. You are creating examples and giving others hope.”

Christie’s top priorities for the project’s first year include purchasing uniforms and shoes, and installing a toilet for the elementary school students; as well as funding three college tuitions annually for orphan girls. Until now, not a single young woman from the orphanage has ever had the opportunity to pursue higher education.

Back in the States, Christie printed out some homemade Avery labels for the tea and put it out for sale at the café counter. But no one was picking it up. She needed a way to communicate to consumers the direct impact they could make by buying The Learning Tea.

That’s where a frequent patron of Christie’s coffee shop, Melissa Kuperminc, comes in. Kuperminc happened to be teaching a class on message and content at the nearby Portfolio Center and she instantly jumped on the chance to design the packaging as part of her class. “The challenge fit perfectly with the course’s objective and our Design Ignites Change involvement,” explains Kuperminc, “to design great things that really communicate a message and actually help people.”

Over the winter quarter, Kuperminc’s students worked to create powerful, inexpensive, easy-to-reproduce packaging for The Learning Tea. Christie was thoroughly impressed by each of the four designs created by the student teams, but the one that really stood out worked by immediately communicating the concept that buying a box of The Learning Tea is equivalent to purchasing a school uniform, 7 school bags, or 20 notebooks for students in Darjeeling. “On our part, we really tried to communicate the message and mission of the tea through our design,” says Hunter Grove who helped develop the winning design.

The team also went above and beyond the original assignment by creating a website that serves to tell even more of The Learning Tea story using Christie’s own photographs. Brian Marcus, another designer who collaborated on the winning design says, “It is a true honor to know that our work helps bring some much needed attention to an extraordinary humanitarian effort.”

The newly packaged tea is flying off the shelves. Christie’s initial supply, expected to last a year, sold out in just two weeks. Whole Foods has even expressed interest in carrying the line. “It is such a great story, and the fact that the tea is doing so well proves that," says designer Hunter Grove.

For now, you can purchase The Learning Tea from Christie’s shop and online. “My store is very small” says Christie, “but it goes to show if you involve your community and ask for help, you can make anything happen.”