How Matthew Boyd is helping children from Uganda — with help from a local coffee roaster

Posted June 19, 2026 10:00 am

By Keith Law

Now in his 12th year in the major leagues, Chicago Cubs left-hander Matthew Boyd has dedicated much of his off-field time to the nonprofit he runs with his wife, Ashley. The organization is called Kingdom Home, which creates opportunities for at-risk Ugandan children by providing them with shelter, food and education at the non-profit’s homes in the eastern part of the central African country.

Boyd is also a bit of a coffee snob, a term I use with endearment as I am most definitely one myself. Boyd’s teammate Ian Happ also qualifies as a coffee connoisseur and he is an investor in the Chicago-area roaster Connect Roasters. Boyd and Connect have collaborated on a special release called Hope Blend. It features coffee beans from Uganda, which is the eighth-largest coffee producer in the world by volume but has an underdeveloped specialty coffee industry. For every bag sold, $3 goes to Kingdom Home. Matthew and Ashley also hosted a fundraiser on Friday at Wrigley Field’s Catalina Club.

I spoke with Matthew about his efforts in Uganda and our shared love of good coffee, as well as Caleb Benoit of Connect about the endeavor and what fellow coffee hounds can expect from a cup of Hope. (Disclosure: Benoit has sent me coffee to sample in the past.)

“When I was at Oregon State for my senior year, I met Ashley, now my wife,” Boyd said about how Kingdom Home got its start. “She was telling me about her heart for social justice, specifically the darkness of child sex trafficking around the world. Me being a 22-year-old, I was like, ‘What is that? That sounds horrible.’ I didn’t know anything about it. She was deciding whether to go the NGO (nongovernmental organization) route or to go into international law, and said, ‘I feel like I can impact more lives if I go the NGO route.’”

As Boyd chased his major-league dreams with the Toronto Blue Jays — he was a sixth-round pick of Toronto’s in 2013 — Ashley pursued her dreams with an organization called Remember Nhu.

“We get married, we have kids, she works herself out of the role in the best way, and we’re trying to decide what’s next,” Boyd continued. “She has always had a heart for Uganda, having done an exchange program there in high school. Uganda has the second-youngest population in the world, and sex trafficking is very prevalent there. In 2017, she gets a call from her former boss, who knew she was trying to decide what’s next. They said there was a bus of 34 girls on the way to a brothel and the Ugandan government intercepted it but had no safe place to put them. They were looking for someone to partner with to create a place for these victims to stay.

“So we said, let’s start a nonprofit. We’re thankful for her old organization, they had the infrastructure to help us get up and running.”

In the nearly 10 years since the Boyds started Kingdom Home, the organization has grown to three homes on a 14-acre property in rural eastern Uganda, close to the border with Kenya, with over 100 kids living there at times. They’re building a fourth home on the property for young adults, and are now looking to build a new facility elsewhere in the country to expand their mission. All of their staffers, including the counselors, are Ugandan, so the program also provides employment in a country with a 42% poverty rate.

Benoit started Connect Roasters in 2016 and found a strong collaboration partner with Kingdom Home.

“I founded Connect on the idea that coffee could be used as a vehicle to help people. This project is how we put action behind those words,” Benoit said. “My favorite collaborations are the ones that combine great coffee, great people and a great cause. And this one checks all those boxes.

“I’m in love with this coffee, honestly. It has the body of a classic Central American profile and berry notes that you often get with something from East Africa. It’s the best of both worlds in a single cup.”

The coffee itself is grown in western Uganda, near the borders with Rwanda, itself a major specialty coffee producer where all washing stations are run by women, and with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has excellent growing conditions for coffee but has been beset by civil wars for most of its history. Uganda produces mostly robusta beans, which fetch lower prices than arabica beans and typically go into instant coffee or other low-cost coffee products, but there’s an ongoing effort to develop the country’s specialty coffee industry, which uses arabica beans, grown in a few regions in western Uganda as well as in the east near Mount Elgon.

The Hope blend takes beans from several farms in the western part of the country, including some from the tiny bit of Uganda that lies south of the equator, producing a full-bodied coffee with strong berry notes. (Arabica beans can have notes from their terroir, just as wines do, which you can pick up in lighter roasts, but which are less evident the darker the coffee is roasted.)

The partnership was a natural for Matthew given his love of good coffee as well.

“I’m not Ian,” he joked, “but I have a pour-over in my room. We got a coffee maker in the clubhouse and a pour-over set. JaMo (Jameson Taillon) and I have a coffee setup. We get the Fellow Drops (a coffee subscription service), so we’ve tried beans from all over.

“Ugandan coffee can be hit-or-miss. Instant coffee is huge in Africa, so you get that when you’re there. When you start to drive through these towns, you see people just drying out their beans on the side of the road on tarps. They’re making instant coffee right there in their kitchens. There’s an art and a craft to it all, just like with what each of us does. It’s all fascinating — it gives you a new appreciation for whatever it is people are doing.”