Category: Graduate Students
Girls Run the World in Gorongosa National Park
By Eric Wilburn, MS ’18, MA ’18
Gabriela “Gaby” Curtiz grew up just down the road from Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique. The park is one of the most biodiverse places on Earth and is surrounded by more than 200,000 people who live on very limited resources. These neighboring communities struggle to make ends meet due to lack of employment. Many young women in these communities lack the opportunity to finish primary school because of societal expectations, household responsibilities, and a shortage of schools and teachers.
When Gaby was twelve years old, her primary school showed a National Geographic film about Gorongosa National Park, sparking her dream to work with animals in the park. Nine years later, Gaby was certified as the first female safari tourism guide in Gorongosa’s history.
I met Gaby last year on her first trip to the United States. She was visiting Boise State University, where she will begin her undergraduate studies this fall. Of course, service was a part of her trip! She gave a talk to a group of elementary school students about Gorongosa. It was amazing to see their eyes light up and their hands skyrocket to the ceiling with questions about her life in Gorongosa. She emphasized the importance of working with local communities in conservation efforts, and explained that providing livelihoods for local families was the key to sustainable nature conservation. Her example? Coffee.
Why coffee? Because there are hundreds of families like Gaby’s living on the flanks of Mount Gorongosa that need an alternative to unsustainable agricultural practices to feed their families. There is no need for farmers to cut down the forests to make room for non-native crops, as farmers can plant native hardwood saplings in between the rows of coffee to provide shade. Coffee gives these farmers a dependable income while helping restore the rainforests of Gorongosa.
I was thrilled to hear Gaby share her story, and was particularly excited when she chose coffee as her example. Having recently graduated from Stanford, I had just begun working with Gorongosa National Park to launch Gorongosa Coffee, a for-profit company that sells premium roasted coffee around the world and sends 100% of profits back to the park to support operating costs.
After her talk, Gaby and I were chatting about how Gorongosa Coffee wanted each of our roasted coffees to support a different initiative in the park. Gaby said that the most unique aspect of Gorongosa is that the park fundamentally believes that girls’ education is the key to both human development and nature conservation.
Inspired by Gaby, Gorongosa Coffee created a Girls Run the World coffee that sends 100% of profits to help over 20,000 girls in Gorongosa finish high school. The funds help build schools, provide high school scholarships, and connect girls with mentors through afterschool programs. We hope to demonstrate that when we give girls in Mozambique the confidence, capability, and opportunities to determine their own futures, we encourage more leaders like Gaby.
One of the defining aspects of our model that helps ensure our company has a positive impact is that the lone shareholder of Gorongosa Coffee is the trust that funds the park. In other words, Gorongosa Coffee is a social enterprise which keeps control of this community-based initiative within the community it serves.
Gaby graduated from high school in Gorongosa and will start at Boise State University in September, pursuing a degree in business tourism. Her goal is eventually to become the head of tourism for Gorongosa National Park.
Gaby and I come from very different backgrounds, but we share a commitment to serving the people, wildlife, and ecosystems of Gorongosa. We believe that the path forward for people and the planet is that every business thrives, not to fill the pockets of a few shareholders, but in service of an equitable and sustainable future for all.
I invite you to help us empower young women like Gaby from the communities of Gorongosa to break barriers and bring positive change to their communities. You may order our coffee at GorongosaCoffee.com.
Eric Wilburn, MS ’18, MA ’18, served in the Peace Corps in Mozambique before arriving at Stanford to pursue dual masters degrees in environmental engineering and public policy. During his time at Stanford, Eric was a Graduate Public Service Fellow and also coached the Stanford Triathlon Team. Recently, Eric has been helping to launch a company called Gorongosa Coffee that aims to benefit local communities, wildlife, and nature in Mozambique by supporting conservation, education, and economic development.
Let’s talk
By Katie Wullert, PhD candidate
The growing political divide in this country is news to no one, but we are often able to avoid the ramifications of this in our private lives by surrounding ourselves with like-minded people and inhabiting ideologically homogeneous social spaces online and in the real world. Every year on the fourth Thursday in November, however, it becomes hard to prevent the political divide from intruding into our private lives as liberal nieces go toe-to-toe with conservative uncles and conservative cousins face off against progressive aunts. The Thanksgiving dinner table has become a notorious place of political contention. This political showdown is not playing out in Washington or on Fox or MSNBC, but in our own homes. What do we do about this contention when it is finally right in front of our faces? If we follow the model of Saturday Night Live, perhaps we play Adele to soothe the room and prevent any conflict from escalating. But what if, instead, we dug into that tension?
That was the premise behind a series of three, hour-long dinner conversations held at the Haas Center this past February. Students with differing political perspectives were brought together to discuss issues that we often do not talk about across political divides. The conversations covered the American Dream, immigration, and freedom of speech vs. controlling hate speech, and students were asked to present their views thoughtfully and listen to the views of others around them. My role in this was to facilitate, provide guiding questions, make sure there was food and the room was ready, and let the conversation unfold as it did. From my perspective as an observer of each of the conversations, one theme clearly emerged: finding common ground is easier than digging into divisions.
As the participants got more comfortable with each other and with the conversations, greater disagreement did emerge, but it is hard to break down the walls of kindness that suggest we should not butt heads with others, and it is comforting to find that the conversation fit into a groove in which people can fundamentally agree. After each dialogue, students expressed their surprise at the fact that there was so much agreement. On one hand, this was a real positive. Students discovered that people they had assumed to hold one opinion actually believed something very different, and two individuals who might have been presumed to be at odds were in fact much more in alignment with each other than expected. On the other hand, the students also noted that they felt there was more there that was never fully discussed, points of contention that were never brought out fully in the open but remained under the surface as if Adele was softly singing to keep tempers in check.
Around another dinner table, the conversations certainly might have looked very different, but the experience of this dinner table left me with one question: when we attempt to come together across political divides, what is the goal? Are we searching for agreement to remind ourselves we are all people? There’s value to that, but also the very real risk of dismissing disagreement that should not just be brushed aside and ignoring views that perhaps can never be reconciled but have immense impact on people’s lives and experiences. Are we instead looking to debate and perhaps even let our tempers flare up as we speak passionately about issues we care about? This ensures we do not ignore important divisions, but also may make us miss places where we do agree as we presume that by knowing one opinion someone has, we know every political view they hold. After watching and reflecting on these three dialogues, the best answer I could come to is that we have to start the conversation and then let it unfold as it does. That is what this group of students did; they were honest and open, and even if certain things were left unsaid, they came out having learned something and hopefully feeling readier for the next conversation and wherever that takes them.
Katie is a third-year PhD student in sociology studying gender and labor market inequality and hopes to graduate in 2021-22. She is currently a Graduate Public Service Fellow at the Haas Center.
