Specialty Coffee Association
The Specialty Coffee Association is a non-profit trade organization with a mission to "engage, inspire, and expand a sustainable global specialty coffee community through leadership in events, education, and research.”
Challenge
The SCA Events team had been working on equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives as they relate to the entire organization and the execution of their teams. The greatest challenge was taking their values in these areas and making them actionable through the processes by which they review event site proposals.
Solution
We created a structure around how to conduct site assessments that led to refining the bidder proposal protocol. Assessments took an equity and social justice approach to evaluate the political stability of the location, safety for attendees for the event (which considered the specific type of event which vary in size), and exclusionist policies at that specific location that could affect attendees. Taken cumulatively, these areas helped guide potential gray-area questions on whether it's safe or ethical to hold an event in that location or with the specific partner.
Deliverables
The work served to ensure that SCA was following and advancing their mission around equity through their event partnerships.
Conducted and wrote 15+ site assessments for their various 2018-2019 event sites (e.g., Kenya, Indonesia, Colombia, South Korea, Taiwan).
Created standard site review protocol and procedures so the assessments could be carried out by internal staff.
Refined the SCA bidder proposal protocol and assessment tool.
“Elizabeth went beyond just being an expert, shepherding us with clear communication that was humbly available to us. We are a large group of strong personalities and various stakeholder perspectives, and Elizabeth brought us together to build consensus in a way that reflected a clear understanding of our needs and her own commitment to the highest possible standard of quality for our project. Every one of us learned something new that we could continue to use in our pursuit of building on the project success.”
— Ellie Hudson, Director of Sustainability Partnerships