14 years ago Michael Sheridan was assigned to me. I was working in the southern Philippines (Mindanao) for CRS, and Michael came in as a Fellow. He’s called that a “lucky break“, and it was for me. We had this odd organizational hierarchy, where I was his “mentor”, but not his supervisor, while he seemed to […]
Twenty years ago, I was in the Peace Corps in Honduras working on water systems, and one of the biggest lessons from that experience was the conviction that if a community could come together and build their own water system, they could do just about anything. When people in a village or small town can […]
In August, after 14 years with CRS (more than 12 of them leading the agency’s coffee programming), I will be leaving CRS and transitioning to a new role as Director of Sourcing and Sustainability at Intelligentsia Coffee based in Chicago. In the meantime, I need to help hire a replacement to lead the CRS Coffeelands […]
A few weeks ago, Starbucks made an incredible announcement. They were going to have nitro cold brew in their cafes!! I think this definitively answers the Symposium question, is cold brew a category or craze? OK, OK. I’m joking. The real earth-shaker is that Starbucks has issued the first US corporate bond for sustainability. The […]
In previous Coffeelands posts we have written about the importance of diversifying smallholder coffee farms as a hedge against falling coffee prices, low coffee productivity resulting from disease (such as coffee leaf rust) and other factors. Diversification into other crops such as nuts, plantains and fruit, among others, also helps to ensure that a farmer […]
Happy New Year amigos! We hope wherever you are, you are enjoying this New Year with good people. May you discover and cultivate peace and wisdom in 2016. Coffeelands Playlist For all of you who follow and participate in Coffeelands, here is a playlist we created on Spotify. Each song has some reference to coffee. […]
Earlier this month, I announced the launch of the CRS Coffeelands Program, a three-year initiative designed to coordinate our work in the coffeelands around the world and drive lasting impact at scale. Today, we start building the Coffeelands Program team, announcing the first of six vacancies worldwide. The Coffeelands Program Officer and the Coffeelands Program […]
In this blog, we write little about our Catholic identity – but behind what we do is a set of principles, based on faith and sense of mission. In this post, I would like to highlight a source of these principles. In May, Pope Francis published Laudato Si (Praised Be), his encyclical on the environment. This treatise is […]
Last week, we announced CRS’ new global coffee program, Coffeelands. In that post, we said that Coffeelands will build the CRS Blue Harvest approach into future programs in the coffeelands. Today, we want to provide you a glimpse of what this means. Background on Blue Harvest Blue Harvest has been highlighted several times in this blog, starting with […]
Two weeks ago, I introduced the G (genotype) x E (environment) x M (management) framework here, and told you about a key finding from the Colombia Sensory Trial: although we designed the Trial to examine the impact of G on cup quality, we found G to be less correlated with cupping scores than E and […]
