Plymouth Rotary names Ed and Micky Giunta Citizens of the Year

PLYMOUTH — Ed and Micky Giunta have been involved in growing, producing, and selling coffee in Puerto Rico and the United States for more than 25 years. In each location, while managing their business, they also enthusiastically give time, financial resources, life skills, and business know-how to people in their surrounding communities.

After moving to Puerto Rico from Germany, where Micky has family, in the early 1990s, the couple began their business as a coffee plantation. Along with providing jobs to the local labor force, they contributed time and resources to the education of their employees' children. Then, in 1995, a hurricane destroyed their plantation. Their next move was to manage another plantation, now in hurricane-free Peru. Micky was raised in a Peruvian mining town at 14,000 feet of elevation, so it was a return home for her.

With a reliable source for high-quality coffee beans established in Peru, Ed and Micky moved to Gilford in late 1995, opening a small coffee shop. Learning that downtown Plymouth would be a more lively place in which to roast and sell coffee products, they opened Café Monte Alto in September 1997, in a corner of the Chase Street Market, strategically located on Main Street across from Plymouth State University. In the 22 years that followed, the café has served generations of coffee-drinkers. The coffee shop has evolved into a bustling downtown focal point, to the point that it is said, if one wants to learn anything about activities and events in Plymouth and the surrounding area, just go to Café Monte Alto.

To support to the communities that have supported their operations, Ed and Micky decided in 1998 to allocate 10 percent of every cup of coffee sold in their shop toward the establishment of an elementary school for the children (including their workers' offspring) in their plantation's poverty-ridden Peruvian community. They constructed the school building and hired the teaching staff, and funded the construction of a medical building for the village. They hired a doctor and other medical staff for the clinic. Both the school and the infirmary are self-sufficient, serving the village's residents today.

Micky and Ed's generous spirit has extended to the arts in the Plymouth area. With both time and money, they support the Plymouth Educational Theatre Collaborative, the New Hampshire Music Festival at Plymouth State University, the Pemi Choral Society’s Mother's Day and holiday concerts, and other theatre and musical performances on the PSU campus.

Through their café, they were major supporters of Plymouth's 250th anniversary celebration in 2013. They regularly contribute to fundraising events by local nonprofit organizations (including the Rotary Club's Penny Sale), usually by giving bags of ground coffee. Along with financial support, they donate coffee and gift cards to PSU fundraisers. Micky goes out of her way to welcome visiting musicians and performers by feeding them at their home and guiding them around the area.

Café visitors enjoy exhibits of paintings, photographs, and occasional woodworking objects displayed on the coffee shop walls. Micky and Ed invite local artists to exhibit their work each month in the café, offering the artists great public visibility and an extraordinary opportunity to sell their creations.

Being an avid long-distance cyclist, Ed spends time encouraging and teaching other people to ride. Café Monte Alto has donated jerseys for local cyclists and sponsors a winter hiking group that gathers each Sunday for a rather rigorous hike.

Because of their decades of responding to economic, literacy and medical needs in their Peruvian community, and their donation of time, energy and money to the arts and other local nonprofit organizations, the Plymouth Rotary has recognized Micky and Ed Giunta for continuing to make a difference while personifying the Rotary International principle of "Service Above Self" and honored them as Plymouth Rotary's 2019 Citizens of the Year.

— Submitted by Plymouth Rotarian Tony Fitzherbert