THERE'S something to be said for connections. In family, business and in life, the ties that bind are strengthened by a common experience, a history and cherished memories.

For David Robinson, 53, the only surviving son of the legendary baseball integrator Jackie Robinson, that tie--to baseball--is tightening. Hopefully, Robinson says, that tie to Major League Baseball (MLB) will lead to bigger and better things.

As one of the founders of Sweet Unity Farms, a cooperative of more than 300 small-scale coffee farmers in the Mbozi District in the Southern highlands of Mbeya, Tanzania, Robinson has worked for years to market their Arabica coffee beans to customers in the United States. The Sweet Unity Farms cooperative collectively grows just under 1 million pounds of coffee annually.

It's no secret that coffee, one of the richest and most consumed commodities in the world, results in little or no profit for coffee farmers. So it would take a new approach and new strategy to help farmers benefit from the fruits--or beans--of their labor.

When Robinson moved from the United States to a Tanzanian village, he says he was searching for an opportunity. In exchange for teaching him and his family (he and his Tanzanian wife of 15 years, Ruti, have six children, and he has four children from previous relationships; a son, Jack, died from malaria at age 6) the secrets of coffee farming, Robinson offered to come up with a better marketing strategy for the local coffee.

"I had never seen coffee until I went to the village where I'm a resident now and met with second-and third-generation coffee farmers," Robinson says from his home in Tanzania. "It's the creation of a finished coffee product and the value-added income that we can try to obtain that is the level of benefit that Africans and African-Americans need to be involved in with this crop that is indigenous to our continent."