“I’ve recently returned from East Africa (Nairobi area and Kilimanjaro/Meru area) and was there on behalf of Schluter coffee trading (based in Switzerland and Liverpool), in the capacity of a storyteller to learn more about coffee cultivation and trade, as well as to gather stories specifically from the farms we buy from. My coffee background is such that I worked for Schluter’s samples department over the course of the last few years and developed a fascination with coffee to match my longstanding fascination with Africa. Trained as an actress, director, storyteller, and teacher, I turned my attentions back to working full time in these areas as a freelance arts practitioner based in London. I found my new passion for coffee haunting me until I began making a way for the two areas of my work to come together.

A lot of my theatre work has had strong ties to human rights work and I see the potential for my stories not simply to inform but also to awaken in people a curiosity and passion for seeing the coffee trade change lives. It starts with harnessing an interest in coffee that I perceive to be dormant and easily awakened in a lot of people the world over (from California to Cape Town, and England to Austria). If we can get people loving good coffee and the stories behind it, we can be sure they’ll care about improving the lives of those in the whole production-consumption chain – and understanding how that can be done. I believe the story is so much more complex than just ’shell out an extra few $ for Fair Trade coffee’, and I want to be a part of communicating the richness of the fuller, and ever growing, story, to
consumers everywhere.

I’m putting together a short program of stories – some specific to coffee growing areas I’ve visited; other stories coming from the consumption end of the chain.”