 Hello. These last two days have been extraordinary. I mean that in the most literal sense of the word. These last two days are not ordinary. It's not ordinary or normal to be able to get together and stop what you're doing and talk about the things that are important to you in this industry. Where I come from in the States, it's not normal to be able to talk about these tough issues that we face with any sort of civility. And I've found that I think the core problem is that when we talk to somebody whose opinion is different than ours on something like immigration, we don't consider what their priorities are or that their priorities might be different than our own. So the book that you all have in your bags called You and I Eat the Same is about immigration. And it's about the ability for food to serve as common ground for us. Whether or not you and I agree on politics, we can at least agree that we all benefit from good food. Food can literally bring us around the same table and be a starting point for discussion. And so the book is part of a series called Dispatches that we're starting to spread MAD's objective of building this community of people who want to affect good change through food. Some of the contributors to this book that I was super honored to work with are here, Osai and Ben and Ariel and Gemra and David and Renee, and our next and last speaker, Arthur Carletwa. With apologies to the new friends I've made these past two days, Arthur is the most interesting person I've met in the past year. We spent two days last summer talking about Arthur's work and his life in Seattle where he was working as the global director of traceability for Starbucks. Arthur is rewondened by birth. He lived and survived the genocide that took a million lives in a hundred days. And his life's work has been about reconciling with what happened and preventing it from ever happening again. He's chosen coffee as his vehicle for change very intentionally. And I've learned an incredible amount, not only about what he does, but about bringing purpose and intention to what I do. So please welcome Arthur Carletwa. How you doing? Well, I'm in between you and a cocktail I hear. So I will be as fast as I can, but I'm extremely honored, humbled and feel so proud to be amongst all of you, to be here at MADD. I can't just thank the organizers enough. Like he said, my name is Arthur Carletwa, but today I've decided to be Kylie Quang as well. I've decided to be Sarah Kay. Maybe tomorrow I'll be Diego Prado. Friday I'll try and be Dennis Mervis. I picked his names randomly from one of you who's here or the names that are in the crowd. And if I mentioned your name, you're probably thinking, how does a stranger know me? Why does he know me? Why is he saying my name out loud? What's he going to do with my name? It's probably freaking you out right now. Understandably so. And it's your identity. It's the foundation of who you are. It's the core of your being, your reason for being. And be noticed to yourself, everyone in this room, we take that for granted. We wake up every morning, take a look in the mirror. What shoes am I going to wear today? I decided what hair am I going to use today? But we take a glance and we think to ourselves, what am I going to do today to stack up that identity that I have, that value, that core asset that I have? Well, you may be wondering what does a name like Arthur, what does a Rwandan have a name like Arthur? Where does that come from? It sounds very English. And rightfully so. It is English. See, I'm from Rwanda, but I was raised by East Africa. I was raised by East Africa because my family and I were running country to country, fleeing war every other country. And my name came from a British refugee camp where a nun was reading King Arthur the book every time to me and I would stop crying. And when my mom would come over to carry me and to hold me, I'd always keep crying. And the nun said to my mom, just read the book and he'll stop crying. So that's how the name Arthur got stuck to me. So I tell you that story because I've been sourcing coffee from hundreds and thousands of farmers. And these farmers in the Equatoria Belt, over 25 million farmers in coffee, a good portion of them were born without an identity. I was born without a birth certificate. Actually, my first piece of identity was my student ID card. Because after we fled from Rwanda to Uganda, and from Uganda to Kenya, from Kenya to Tanzania, and Tanzania back to Uganda, it was right in 1993 when we were ready to go back home, my family and I. We had been embracing all these identities, all these false identities that were not ours as immigrants, as refugees. You try to fit in and survive. You try to, you know, speak Swahili, speak Uganda, eat like a Kenyan, drink like a Kenyan, dress like a Ugandan, so that you immerse yourself. I recall my father telling us all the time, you know, fit in, don't stick out, immerse yourself. And that's just the mode of survival. Learning a ton of languages did not hurt either. But in 1993, we celebrated thinking the peace treaty of the Rwandans can go back home now. We can go back home. We can stop faking it. And just before the ink could dry, the genocide broke out. And after running from a false identity and finally coming home to embrace your own identity and be embraced back, we were killed or murdered for the wrong identity. So witnessing the genocide, witnessing children get murdered, women get raped over and over again, little infants getting slammed against tree trunks, gave me a true understanding of what identity truly means. It helped me understand how humanity could get to that level. It wasn't until, however, I got fortunate enough to get a basketball scholarship in 1996 to go to Ventura, California. And it is there I got my first student ID. It had a picture of me and my name right underneath of it. It was one of my most prized possessions. That car didn't sleep under my pillow. It slept inside of my pillow. It was incredible because I could go with that piece of plastic and go to the cafeteria and eat as much food as I wanted. I could go to the library and flash that piece of plastic and borrow as whatever book I wanted to borrow and bring it back whenever I wanted to. I was on the basketball team, so all I have to do was show that card and I would get shoes every other month. It was unbelievable. And then I got a California's ID and I was able to get a bank account. I got a bank account and I was able to be able to fill out an application to rent a room. I mean, my stack just kept going higher and higher. I started to build a ledger of who I am. I started to get an identity. I started to mean something. I was getting noticed and acknowledged and picked out of a crowd and my name finally had value. It is there that I realized that what does it mean to actually have an identity? And I started to get answers around how the genocide would totally have happened. Because as much as I tried to get closure about the genocide that was just eating me up, as much as I was on the basketball team and going to school in college in the United States, I was still being haunted. Because when the last machete went down in Nuremberg, when the last machete went down in the genocide, after a million people had been macheted meticulously in a hundred days, that is 10,000 a day, that is 400 an hour. By the time I finish this talk, it'll be this room. By the time the last machete went down, there was two types of people. Those who died and those who rose from the dead. I was one of those who rose from the dead. I don't have to tell you that you can feel dead inside, even though you still have a heartbeat. And so that gave me reason to just take the chokehold of anger and vengeance off of my throat and try to figure out what happened in the genocide. I had to get closure. But unfortunately, I was raised without understanding how to deal with trauma. My dean of history, whom I lived with in college, he was a dear man, dear friend and continues to be close as a parent to me. He told me, Arthur, I will take you to counseling. I will help you see counseling. And I said to him, Gary, I don't know what that means. I can't speak to a stranger about my issues. I was raised in a way that I speak to family and relatives about things that ail me. People who know me better than I know myself. And after months of him pestering me and trying to get me to go, I said, all right, Gary, let's go. You say your counselor is a friend. Let's go see him. And we had dinner. It was a very casual conversation. And we spoke for hours. And I had never spoken so long in my, you know, since I'd left 94, I started to feel a huge feeling of weight off me. And after 45 minutes of talking, the counselor stopped, took his glasses off, took a deep breath and crossed his legs and said, now, where is Rwanda again? And that was it. But, you know, I don't expect everybody to know where Rwanda is or where everything else is. But it was such a tear down that I decided to take Gary's advice soon after we left, which was, Arthur, understand what happened. Read as much as you can to understand the historical events of the genocide. And maybe that'll help you gain closure. And so that's what I did. I read as much as I could. And I found in a nugget one of the things that wasn't being talked about quite a bit. And one of the things that wasn't being talked about was the issue of poverty, the epidemic of poverty that not the kind that you read in the Webster's Dictionary that is legitimate, which talks about the lack of basic needs, such as lights and water and a roof over your head. It's the kind of poverty that you don't see in the Webster's Dictionary. It's the kind of poverty that strips you of your self-worth that makes you feel invisible. It's the one that whose scars and scar tissue are inside. The one that if you're invisible, you can kill and therefore no one will notice or be killed and therefore no one will miss you. And so that's the one that I realized that I needed to focus on. And to heal again and to take the chokehold of vengeance and suffocation, I decided to wage a war on poverty. I decided to wage a war on poverty through agriculture because agriculture was the backbone of my country's economy. And tea and coffee fell into those two categories. But I didn't get into coffee because I loved coffee. I got into coffee because I hated coffee. I hated what it did and what it didn't do. Coffee had three laws in Rwanda when the Belgians introduced coffee in Rwanda. You could not drink coffee. You could not cut a tree down. And with the property, the size of this grass that I'm sitting on, you had to grow coffee. And so you can imagine the suppressing cycle of poverty that that caused. So through that incredible commodity we call coffee, I wanted to give the gift of identity. I had tasted the fruits of what it meant to have one. And I wanted to do the same to all Rwandans. And so I started to work on the traceability system to bridge that gap of identity. I'm about to share a horrific image here, but these are the scars, the outside scars of genocide. But this gentleman is putting himself closer to the light closer to the light to show the scars because they're not deeper than the ones that he has inside. And those are the ones I was trying to find out. Those are the ones I was trying to unearth. Underlying that is our core identity. We all have scars, but the ones that are inside bite much more than the ones that are outside. So I was inspired, of course, to fulfill an objective. An objective that would help me understand how this product is not only traded across the world, but how it also preserves, captures, and maintains the identity of people across the supply chain. And it wasn't trying to get an extra dollar or two, although that would be good. And that has been good to producers. My core objective was to increase the visibility of our supply chain while preserving the identity of people. So in essence, traceability in this technical term is the literal and figurative ability to capture, preserve, and link identity of producers to their commerce. But to me, it wasn't merely through technical accuracy. It was with moral credibility. I needed to do it with restoration of the dignity of people. So my focus on building traceability platform was to enable and revolutionize a collective approach to storytelling. So I needed a reason to begin. If I sketched where coffee really starts, I would also be able to sketch a fingerprint, which is one of the most unidentified, unreplaceable pieces of our human body. Even though you're a twin in this room, you have your own unique identity ridges and lines on your fingers. If I could keep that intact on a cherry for a producer, imagine what I could do to restore their dignity. So until then, seeing the invisible dots that connect each of us was difficult in a commodity such as coffee. But we decided to work on a technology to change that. So we all know that when we talk to each other about let's grab coffee. Let's meet for coffee. We're not going to go sit down and talk about the elevation of the coffee or the soil composition or the varietal. We're going to talk about things that matter to us because coffee has always had the ability to connect people face to face but now only to get it to connect people across the world. So in the world of traceability, the market today is dealing with traceability in ways to improve supply chain management, to ensure immediate tracing for food safety, and also to differentiate the market. It's been used in multiple ways. But traceability of course enables much more than claims. I was fortunate enough to speak with the folks at Patagonia who wanted to trace their goose down a couple years ago and they came up with a way that they could track their jackets and have responsible ways of harvesting goose down. The chocolate industry of course is using traceability for premiumization and we all know how platforms such as Lyft and Airbnb are using our identity and using these platforms to really build trust and enable how data reaches to you and I. So clearly the market is moving and we all know that claims are just a starting point. So here's a question to you. What's your identity gap and what is it worth to you? Behind the scenes of traceability of course and I'm going to rush through this as I get to what is the critical point here. The back end which is the boring part of course is more of the how we get data from point to point. We were trying to get through the way conventional coffees trade is over the fence information whereby information is shared across different multiple transit points and what I was trying to achieve here was to create a path with an integrated supply chain that is cloud-based so that we are sharing information upstream and we can get it at any one time. So the focus of the product traceability is really high rich data and as I mentioned earlier before this is not a story about technology. It's a story about our belief in the power of human connection about what happens when we replace labels with faces and how global transformation starts when people have a one-to-one connection. Again the back end of this is complex and connecting the dots as you can tell is complex. Coffee moves in multitudes of ways. It's aggregated multiple of times. It has a multitude of middlemen. However with a platform that connects transit points this is how I'm able to capture lot identity and every contributor's name in whatever aggregation happens. So I'll show you really quick just how it looks from a visualization standpoint. So if I put a legend up here you'll be able to see that I will just capture a few producers and focus on Rwanda for now. There's 57 links here but right now I'll highlight 45 farmers otherwise with 4,800 farmers of which I have data for you'll see a ton of you look like a spider web. So here you can obviously see 12 mills are going to be the network of the supply chain. It's going to go through two warehouses and we'll have 57 links all together. So you can go all the way down to the GPS coordinates to see exactly where the producers are because the cornerstone of traceability is capturing the identity and location of producers. And then you show the corresponding coffee washing station mills of which these producers deliver to and where their coffee is processed. At each coffee washing station I'm able to get daylight information and I'll show you that through the metrics. So the metrics of course show me and give us a lot more data. It shows me the land size however small it is. It's usually the size of this stage here. It will show me the capacity of total production per hectare. It will break it down into cherry production, green bean production and ultimately parchment production. As you can tell we have information of each producer and their respective productivity. And then I'll come on here and I'll show you a node view, a different view of how you can see this data showing each producer in nodes and their corresponding delivery to each washing station. Allowing us to really begin to see each producer's daily lot, each producer's ID and how it moves across the supply chain. As you can tell a lot of these producers will aggregate their coffee altogether and guaranteed one or two or three or ten of these producers are going to be drinking banana beer all season and not focus on quality and they're going to be a bad apple. And their aggregation of their coffee may create a disdain in a specific lot. My ability to back trace to see where that bad apple came from allows me to not make sure that people do not, it's almost to create a regime of accountability so that we don't reject an entire container just because of one bad apple. Or if we do, we at least know where it came from and not everybody is desentivized. And each one shows you each bag code as well. So it goes down to a specific lot ID number. All right, so again it's linking commerce to identity and this is kind of the work I've been doing from the Ethiopian commodity exchange, the potato defect contamination isolation, 26 countries that on the Starbucks reserve platform and so on and so forth. But all that data means nothing if I can't get it to consumers. It means nothing if I can't create an experience where consumers can appreciate where their coffee comes from, where consumers can appreciate people, place and culture. I talked earlier about how you know the council I spoke to did not know where Rwanda was. That is nothing of his fault because recently an atrocity disgusting and despicable event happened in the United States in Charlottesville. You know, terrible racial, you know, what have you. And as much as I was disgusted, as much as I punched my fist in the air about the atrocities, I found myself asking where is Charlottesville? And once I unearthed where Charlottesville was to understand people and culture and place, I quickly realized that these people have been taught bigotry and divisionism since they were little kids. And this is how they are. I need to understand them more. I need to have more empathy. I need to meet them halfway. And that's what I'm trying to build with bringing this kind of data to the front center of conversation. And this is an example of kind of the different ways I was doing it. The idea I'm partnering with Starbucks to build an experience that would give their consumers a deep dive into the transparency of their complex supply chain. This includes showing the incredible journey and a life cycle of the coffee and the humanity surrounding it. Starbucks has been doing a great job with the launch of their new grocery location in Seattle, all of their reserve lines of coffee to really get to the heart of these great coffees. And we were tasked with building a digital experience to let the consumer see this story from the beans being picked all the way to the cup. So to tell the story of traceability in a digital fashion, we created an augmented table experience that would allow users to place a specially designed coaster on the screen and learn about the reserve roast being brewed that day through the coaster itself. Starbucks has done an incredible job of outlining the traceability of these reserve coffees all the way down to the farms and farmers that pick the beans. Our table experience gives you a portal into that traceability unless you see where the coffee comes from and the people that produce it. Working with Starbucks has opened our eyes to an amazing process involving so many moving parts, people and cultures that it really needs to be visible to the average consumer in some way. As a consumer myself, seeing this level of providence pertaining to the origin of my coffee and the people who grow it really elevates the personal brand equity for me. It's really easy to trust a company that has this much transparency in their process. Behind each of these coffees is an individual cultural or personal story and the table is just a small glimpse into this world. So that's just one example of ways that I've been trying to unearth what is back end boring numerical data into beautiful authentic and participatory information that gives people a little glimpse into places they can't even pronounce or could maybe just care less of. I know folks who know more information about Ethiopian coffee but wouldn't be able to point Ethiopia on a map let alone understand the history of a people in a place, the people behind the product. So I transferred that information on the table that you saw onto mobile phones and I was able to capture that same data and transfer that data to recognize the labels on a bag and take you to place in a much richer and richer and authentic way. I wanted to be very prominent about making sure you see the farmer first to be introduced to be greeted by, to be invited by the producer into their into their sanctuary. I added features like music with Spotify so that you can understand the kind of music in that culture, in that space. It is what makes us a people, it's what threads us together, our food, our music, our culture, our artifacts and of course you continue to navigate the farm and the place and begin to see a good amount of features and it takes you into the whole journey of who's touched your coffee from point A to point Z and you begin to see just all the critical transit points. So it's essentially a nervous system of humanity that I'm trying to stitch together. I love this quote by Alex Pentland, to ensure a sustainable future society we must use evolving technologies to create a nervous system for humanity that maintains the stability of government, energy and public health systems around the globe. Before I end here, and I know I'm out of time, but I was extremely inspired by the last day here about what I heard and what I saw in this conference and multitude of incredible speakers that I went back to my room last night and I just started typing. I started writing stuff that showed me just the convergence and relationship between coffee and food. I just wanted to read this to finish my talk here. When we eat, we take refuge to another dimension. When I think of my life as a refugee, I think of how coffee has always embraced its life cycle as the true manifestation of a refugee. Some of the places it's plucked from usually always a couple of, there's usually a couple of things in common. These places are landlocked, they're under a mineral trap, they have poor leadership and they lack opportunity. These places are the perfect conditions for war and the displacement of people. Coffee never leaves her habitat on her own discourse or desire. After a long and at times treacherous journey, she eventually ends up in neighborhoods and homes, your kitchens and mine, in places full of laughter, joy and a time tranquility. Imagine the life of a refugee embraced just so. Through the eyes of her journey, we see the brunt of epidemic poverty, endemic poverty, sorry, every single day. We see thin people, bent people, dirt covered people, hungry people, people with stories and realities much different than yours or I's. And even without knowing the whole story of their lives, they influenced me. They influenced how I work and live and what I believe about this world. I have met women producers in Rwanda that have completely changed my life. After the genocide, the ratio of men to women was one to four. The men were either all dead in exile or in prison. Rwanda today has the highest women in parliament at 64% in the world. These women have had a trickle down, in fact, influence on me like nothing else. Rape was a weapon of war. HIV was a weapon of war in Rwanda during the genocide. These women producers that I've met and have worked alongside have been nothing but heroes to me. I have met women who have bore the children of one of the 40 men that raped them. Today, these children are 18, 20, 24 years old. They've become men. I've worked alongside women who have murdered these children, not because they want to, but because they've woken up in nightmares. They've woken up with their children standing on top of their beds, waking up mom, saying, you're having a dream mom, and first sight is the man is back. These women have stabbed these children time and time and time again, only to wake up and find out what they've done. These women have been resilient. They've been persistent. They've lived on. They are the ones that are carrying that country on their shoulders. Through the eyes of her journey, we see the brunt of endemic poverty every single day. I love photography and I use my images to trade stories as a core ingredient of the product. See, a friend of mine once told me that storytelling is a critical component of human survival and sustainment. He said to me, storytelling has survival information that our lives literally depend on. Think about it. Storytelling has been around since whatever human evolution you believe in. I am certain that early women told early child, don't feed the dinosaurs. That's how we lost your dumb dad. Or David, son of Solomon, must have told his kids, a few rocks will take down one big bully, but make sure you learn how to run fast in case the third stone does not take him down. I am going to teach my children not to stick a metal object in a toaster. Storytelling has survival information. Like coffee, food is the perfect convener. The centerpiece at every conversation, it's the silent listener. Like coffee, it carries the burden and responsibility to preserve humanity's survival information through uncensored storytelling. The kind of story where the journey of all our ingredients is the author. Like coffee, these conversations have been a contextual tightrope for most of us. There's prejudice looming next to pride, beauty next to desolation, devastating poverty right beside abundant opportunity. But to talk about the womb and fuzzy feeling that coffee or food gives us without addressing her struggles would be disingenuous. To talk about her struggles without the hope she gives many would be disheartening. This dilemma is further complicated when we start talking about the people behind the ingredients and the livelihoods whose dependency is synonymous with the unpredictability of next year's crop. Complicated as it is, the conversation is not only imperative, but also necessary. There's an infectious hope found in the power of telling, listening and living our human stories. None of us are perfect. None of us have lived without the moments of both pain and joy. None of us has ever done this thing called life before. And yet understanding the gaps of our identities gives us the lubrication of life that connects us and helps us to understand each other, be more familiar with each other and ultimately have empathy to one another. No matter what culture we come from, let's view our plates of food as a reflection of ourselves, a beautiful mess. Through the lens of our ingredients of our journey, let's remind the young women and men hustling and bustling behind the scenes that they too are a critical part of a huge hub and spoke, thereby making them agents of global development. But this doesn't happen until you connect the dots. Only then will we narrow this gap we're talking about. Thank you.