Trinidad & Tobago
In the early part of the twentieth century, cocoa agriculture was one of Trinidad and Tobago’s most vibrant sectors. Records show that in the 1920s T&T produced more than 35,000 metric tons of cocoa a year, making it one of the world’s top producers at that time. But that was before oil and gas. Once this country became dependent on the energy sector, the cocoa industry declined steadily. Now, the country produces less than 1,000 metric tons annually.
Meet Gillian Goddard of Sun Eaters Organics, founder and convener of the Cross Atlantic Chocolate Collective, along with two other team members, Dr. Kevin Adonis Browne and Dawn Cumberbatch, who are also co-founders of The caribbeanmembryproject.com
Source: © MEP Publishers | The chocolate revolution in Trinidad & Tobago | Cookup | Caribbean Beat Magazine https://www.caribbean-beat.com/issue-145/chocolate-revolution-trinidad-tobago#ixzz7A89dzIcF
Meet The Team
Gillian Goddard
Gillian Goddard is a systems thinker and community organizer who engages mainly with food and agriculture to instigate change. She has been gardening and farming indigenous style for over three decades. She has also played different roles in delivering her harvest, and that of others, to nearby communities. She has waited tables in Washington DC, started a zero waste organic locavore vegan cafe in Port of Spain, led raw food retreats in Miami Beach, kept chickens and rabbits in many places in the western hemisphere, foraged regularly in high desert west Texas, founded a Caribbean rural network of cocoa growing/chocolate producing communities, and recently convened a global pan-African chocolate collective, all while unschooling her two children to adulthood. She has been mainly stationary in her native Trinidad and Tobago for the past seven years. Her online spaces include www.chocolaterebellion.com and on IG @suneaters, @thenewruraltt and @crossatlanticchocolate.
Dawn Cumberbatch
Dawn Cumberbatch is a screenwriter, archivist, and researcher. She is co-founder and managing director of Doux Doux Darling Productions Limited, a video and event production company; owns and manages Virtual Carnival, a creative agency specialising in interactive content; and is co-founder of The Caribbean Memory Project, a vernacular digital archive. A fierce advocate for local content with a broad diasporic scope, Dawn has written, produced, and directed several documentaries in Trinidad and Tobago, and throughout the Caribbean. She was line producer on The Ghost of Hing King Estate and the award-winning short film, Fish; production assistant and researcher on London-based Zenith Entertainment’s Our House/Our Home series for UKTV Style; associate producer for Marathon Films (Paris) for a series of children’s documentaries; and production assistant for Paris-based Dum Dum Films and Rituals Music. She worked as Stage and Business Manager to Producer with Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott and the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, and at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. as part of the company’s Allen Lee Hughes Fellowship for theatre practitioners of colour. Dawn is a graduate of the College of Communications at Boston University, where she pursued a degree in film and television, with an emphasis on screenwriting and production. Her script, Fresh Kills won first prize in the Gary Fleder/Scott Rosenberg Short Screenplay Competition. Her screenadaptation of the popular Caribbean novel, Green Days by the River premiered at 2018 Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival.
Kevin Adonis Browne
I'm a Caribbean American writer, photographer, and scholar with a focus on Black Rhetorics. I teach at Syracuse University, but have lived in Trinidad since 2017. I was born here, but emigrated to the US in 1990.On IG and Twitter, I'm @drbrowne
You can check out my latest project on www.nowordsproject.com and get a more general sense on www.drbrowne.me