ChariTEA Of The Quarter: UK Black Pride

July 01, 2020 Georgina Webb 2 comments

What is ChariTEA?

We choose a new ChariTEA (Charity!) every quarter which is close to our hearts. They choose a blend that reflects them or what they support and we donate the profits of the blend to their cause!

For the quarter July 2020 to September 2020 our chosen ChariTEA was UK Black Pride

The tea they chose as their blend was Mocha Chai and we we thrilled to donate £2,269.02 to them!

About UK Black Pride

Founded in 2005, UK Black Pride is Europe’s largest celebration for LGBTQ people of African, Asian, Caribbean, Middle Eastern and Latin American descent, and is a safe space to celebrate diverse sexualities, gender identities, gender expressions and cultures. UK Black Pride organises an annual celebration during pride month, as well as a variety of activities throughout the year, which promote and advocate for the spiritual, emotional and intellectual health, and wellbeing of the communities we represent.

Phyll Opoku-Gyimah is the nucleus of the award-winning celebration and protest that is UK Black Pride. Widely known as Lady Phyll – partly due to her decision to reject an MBE in the New Year’s Honours' list to protest Britain’s role in formulating anti-LGBTQ penal codes across its empire – she is also the executive director of Kaleidoscope Trust, an organisation working towards the liberation of LGBTQ people around the world; a community builder and organiser; an Albert Kennedy Trust patron, and a public speaker focusing on race, gender, sexuality and class. She's regularly called upon to advise nascent LGBTQ organisations around the world to help leaders create cogent organising strategies, establish robust partnership networks and work effectively in service of the LGBTQ community.

www.ukblackpride.org.uk

Twitter @MsLadyPhyll
Instagram @ladyphyll

Twitter and Instagram @ukblackpride

Want to recommend someone for our next ChariTEA?

If you know a great cause that you think we can support through our ChariTEA sales then please get in touch by sending us an email to info@birdandblendtea.com.

There aren't any rigid conditions for who we choose, but we do try to support causes that are close to either one of our team members or customer's hearts for a specific reason. If you have something in mind, send them our way!

Back to News from the Nest

2 comments

Ian @ B&B May 18, 2022

Hello Clare

Thank you for leaving a comment on our blog post!

As a tea company we specialise in fun, unique and exciting blends, due to this we are in a unique position in the market as we aim to have the widest range of tea blends available to customers. However this comes with a drawback of having an extremely complicated supply chain. In any blend there can be around 10 different ingredients from tea to herbs to unique ingredients that don’t fit into either category.
Given this complexity we aren’t able to match some of the ethical claims of single origin brands but we do a lot to ensure that we’re sourcing ethically. All of our suppliers are screened with a supplier code of conduct to ensure they meet food safety standards and that they have ethical labour practises.
As we specialise in high quality ingredients, the majority of our producers use organic and sustainable farming methods. However due to the high costs of a lot of the certifications, not all of our producers are ‘officially’ organic or Fairtrade. This is the same case for Fairtrade and rainforest alliance certifications; a lot of our producers adopt all the same practises but if they are small family run farms the costs and the paperwork are a barrier to them being able to gain the ‘official’ badge. Therefore we opt to have a diverse range of suppliers from large estates that have multiple certifications to supporting smallholder farmers who are part of cooperatives.

Clare May 18, 2022

Hi B&B!

I just wondered if your tea is fair trade? I couldn’t see any info about how the actual tea and raw ingredients are grown.
Your eco credentials are impressive, but fairness throughout the supply chain is also something I care about when trying to make ethical consumer decisions.

Thank you :)