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| Giant coffee cup/planter at Casa Hayes-Boh #thankthefarmers and #thanktheartists Custom pottery by Just Claying Around |
Please have a look at the student presentations if you have not already. After that, please return to this page for some words of my own, and before that for some from previous students in the class.
Of course, students who have studied The Secret Life of Coffee this semester will never look at coffee in the same way again. One of the most extraordinary examples of what can happen once coffee is the focus of sustained attention is Danielle Robidoux, who first enrolled in The Secret Life of Coffee in 2009. She continued to work for a well-known coffee retailer and to major in economics. But she also took the January 2010 travel course to Nicaragua and continued her study of fair trade in directed studies at Bridgewater State and eventually in a master's thesis at UMass-Boston.
Danielle now holds a very interesting position in one of the world's most important coffee companies, which is conveniently located five miles from the BSU campus. Equal Exchange is one of the pioneers of fair-trade coffee in the United States, and it was an Equal coffee expert who started me on my journey with a classroom visit in 1999.
When Equal Exchange decided to begin organize its customers to foster alternative approaches to the entire food system, they let me know they were hiring a couple of people to lead that effort. I was delighted that they agreed Danielle would be perfect as part of the new Action Forum team. The journey came full circle recently, as Danielle traveled to Chiapas with an Equal Exchange delegation, and invited me to take part in a presentation about that amazing journey. Pour yourself a deep cup of coffee and settle in for her story.
Another student whose connection to coffee began in this course and deepened in a Nicaragua experience is Sullivan Cohen, who grew up in Bridgewater and knew me before I was teaching coffee courses. Like Danielle -- and about a dozen other Coffee Achievers over the years -- Sullivan took both the on-campus seminar and the travel course to Nicaragua. I remember that during a visit to my home kitchen to learn about brewing (yes, I sometimes do that with small classes), Sullivan had unusually specific questions about how I was grinding the coffee. A few years later, his mother sent me a story from Daily Coffee News, about Sullivan's new coffee program at a baker in Boulder. I knew that Boulder was an important coffee town and that Sullivan was working in coffee there; I did not know that "coffee program" was a thing, and the only way to stand out in such a serious coffee market.
But Sullivan had done it, and his journey had started in Bridgewater coffee classes. You can learn about his journey directly from him, in this video I recorded at one of our favorite coffee farms. When we organized a special 10th-anniversary coffee tour, we were delighted that Sullivan was able to join us.
You can learn his story from this video recorded during our 10th-anniversary Coffee Reunion in Nicaragua.
And now a few videos from the Coffee Maven.
First is a short piece recorded by one of my coffee students in November 2015. She was working at the time for one of the university's social-media offices. I am very grateful that she persuaded her supervisors to include me in a project they called Humans of BSU.
"For me, coffee is a way to connect our students to the wider world." -James Hayes-Bohanan, geography professor #HumansofBSU
Posted by Bridgewater State University on Friday, November 13, 2015
A few months prior to that, I had given a talk about a vision for the future of coffee on our campus; the context of the talk is explained on my Coffee Belwethers post. Because my confusion about the spelling of bellwether is part of the talk, I have left it in place!
Just last week was my latest public lecture on coffee, a Zoom event entitled #ThankTheFarmers, which I presented together with my wife and colleague Pamela Hayes-Bohanan as part of a One Book One Community series.
I cannot end this post without a plug for Coffee Week BSU, my summer course in which we are especially hoping to enroll in-service teachers. In fact, the course was designed with such an audience in mind. The video below was put together by the clever outreach folks in our summer session office, before the plague. The summer version of the course will capture the same spirit, but at a social distance.
A video I recently prepared for that class is available to all -- Alien Coffee explores the mystery of why I recently put cream in my coffee!
Summer bonus -- on June 26, 2020, I participated in a discussion of the connections between coffee quality and the values of fair trade. It is part of an occasional series of discussions with the citizen consumers of the Equal Exchange Action Forum. The discussion was facilitated by Danielle Robidoux, one of the former students in this class who is mentioned above.
Lagniappe
See the Coffee and Tea Cinema page for many more coffee stories, including both documentary films and feature films with a coffee theme. Not included on that page (because I do not know how to update BSU web sites any more) is perhaps the best of all the coffee documentaries: Connected by Coffee. I was at the Boston premiere (in a coffee shop) and started showing it in my classes. During my fourth or fifth viewing, I decided I should try to find the Las Diosas (The Goddesses) cooperative in Nicaragua. Thanks to my remarkable guide and friend Freddy Membreño, I was able to visit them in 2018. No thanks to the dastardly president of Nicaragua, I have not been able to return yet. Emphasis on yet: I will take students back to Estelí. Meanwhile, I recommend this film.
And finally -- coffee films will be featured and discussed in depth during my five-day Coffee Week online class, June 15-19, 2020.
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