Serving People Serving Coffee Since 2005
Issue link: http://baristamagazine.epubxp.com/i/686001
Kimberly Easson Driven by Quality Coffee + Quality of Life By Erin Meister MASTER KIMBERLY EASSON is a force for good. Not just good coffee—though her 25 years in the specialty industry certainly prove she is that—but also good humor, good sense, and great good deeds, and she's a force, indeed: Kimberly's CV includes credentials such as cofounding the International Women's Coffee Alliance (IWCA); serving as director of producer services and relations for Fairtrade International; creating an origin-trip-planning company, JavaVentures, to connect scores of coffee professionals to the coffeelands; organizing the JavaJog fund-raising 5K walk/ run road races to benefit women coffee farmers; and, currently, acting as gender advisor for the Coffee Quality Institute (CQI), overseeing the Partnership for Gender Equity (PGE). Basically doing whatever she can to make the world a better place, for everyone, everywhere. While she's probably best-known in coffee circles for her work with women's empowerment at origin, Kimberly told me via Skype recently that really, the goal is to lift up all people by systematically undoing oppression and inequity: "It's important to look at the resilience of the overall value supply chain by looking at the issues that women face inside of a household," she says. "And that men face, too." Her coffee career started almost by accident (she almost ended up in the plastic-bag industry ... kind of), but Kimberly has spent more than two decades now committed to bridging the gap between coffee people on both sides of the Global North/South divide; as a trip leader, advisor, lecturer, writer, entrepreneur, researcher, fund-raiser, and all around go-getter for goodness, she has inspired and engaged in countless constructive conversations and forged many a path through the tangled jungle of some of the most complicated social, cultural, economic, and moral issues facing not just coffee, but all global trade. 81 www.baristamagazine.com