Putting ANT at the heart of local coffee roasting

 

How did you hear about ANT?

“The short answer is that we found ANT through Google! It was after doing a lot of research on tree planting schemes and organisations that offer tree planting services to businesses and not really being convinced about any of them. We weren’t looking to tick a box or make any claims about how much carbon we had offset – we simply wanted to support something that was a charity rather than a business, and support a good cause in the most effective way possible.”

 

Why did you choose to support ANT as a business?

“One of the reasons that we wanted to start a business was to give us a platform to support a good cause, and this was something we wanted to make central to the business from the outset. 

We also knew we wanted to support a cause related to the environment and ideally planting trees. However, we were wary that a lot of tree planting schemes focused on carbon offsetting – ‘give us X amount of money and you can say you have offset X amount of carbon’. While I’m sure these schemes have the best of intentions, I’m not sure they all stand up to scrutiny and it is hard to explain to customers how you can be sure how much carbon you have actually offset. 

It was also important that we found somewhere local so it would be relatable to our customers and something they could directly benefit from or get involved with, and for our business to be able to get directly involved with too, rather than just donating money. We’ve been able to volunteer with ANT a couple of times and actually help plant the trees on two of your sites which is really great. 

We loved ANT’s model too – buying land to create permanent new woodland. Essentially ANT was the perfect charity for us as it is local, and we can actively support it by volunteering too.”

 

Why is ANT’s cause important to you?

“On a personal level, I love forests and woodlands so I love what ANT is doing. Then from a business perspective we genuinely believe that all businesses have a responsibility to try to mitigate the impact they have. As coffee roasters, we depend on a healthy environment that enables the coffee plant to grow. Climate change is already having a big impact on the coffee industry with many crops being destroyed by pests and diseases that are made worse by the changing environment.”

 

Can you tell us more about your new mural? 

“When we decided to open up a coffee shop one of the things we were excited about was how we could potentially use it to promote ANT in some way.  We thought the mural would be the perfect way to do this as it would make a really interesting feature in the cafe, it would allow us to let our customers know that we support ANT and most importantly it would be a way of promoting ANT. We worked with a local artist to create the mural and we think he’s done an amazing job of creating a woodland scene that hopefully represents the sort of thing that ANT are trying to create!”

 

We would like to give a big thank you to Jon for taking the time to talk with us, and for Boona Boona’s continued support of ANT. Our business donors really do make the difference between being able to buy land to create new, permanent woodlands – and maintain them – or these projects not having the finance to be viable. If you would like to find out more about how your business can support ANT, visit our Business Supporters page.