Tertulia Andina’s pathway started in 2018 as part of a social organization under the name of CCAIS whose acronym means in English “Environmental Citizenship and Social Innovation Corporation”. The organization was founded as a byproduct of several workshops and projects undertaken in the area of sustainable consumption and alternative development over the course of 3 years since 2015. Such projects involved the participation of NGOs, Universities, State Owned companies, and enterprises to promote a sustainable livelihood for coffee producers and the consumers which received the name of the Fair Coffee and Sumak Kawsay Alliance.
Our motivation started off as an interest in providing a practical contribution to address several problematics identified by us in relationship to sustainable consumption, social justice and economic development surrounding the coffee market. For this reason, we started by organizing workshops with the interinstitutional network called “Fair Coffee and Sumak Kawsay alliance” in order to tackle the global and local characteristics of the issues in hand.
Our first Network’s workshops took place at the University of San Buenaventura in Bogotá, in the context of the Research Project “Sumak Kawsay” of professor Servio Caicedo Ph.D. Four workshops and open events were held in which students, professors and external participants engaged in knowledge sharing on sustainable consumption, indigenous livelihoods, and the coffee market. Coffee from local producers near the area of Bogotá and the municipality of Pasto were commercialized as a way to establish a social practice for sustainable consumption. Additionally, coffee tasting sessions were held with the V60, French press and Espresso methods.
With this experience we improved the quality and applicability of our workshops, which acquired a stronger emphasis on the philosophy of the Buen Vivir (or Sumak Kawsay in Quechua language), as a useful framework to understand the practices of a responsible consumer along with the need to protect the livelihood of small coffee farmers and the environment. In 2019 our project was redesigned with the nature of a company, as the workshops were combined with a focus on a fair commercialization of organic coffee with buyers that possessed the same values as ours in the city of Bogotá, Colombia. To implement the new workshops we established an alliance with Ecomindala S.A.S., a socially and environmentally responsible coffee roaster, who founded the sustainable coffee trademark Dulce Milagros, nurtured by a network of women from the municipality of Buesaco in Nariño, Colombia.
Finally, Tertulia Andina cofffee was founded in 2021 in the city of Hamburg to establish partnerships with roasters and consumers in Europe who are interested in supporting small-holders from Colombia. In line with this, our organization is currently part of on a global platform project started by Prospera Coffee GmbH., that is committed to promote a fairer trade of coffee and transparent market relationships that are able to benefit the consumers and specially, disadvantaged smallholders. Since then, our goal has been to promote the export of organic and environmentally sustainable coffee from smallholders to Germany and Finland.
Cafe Sarralde 