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Salada, Deaf Can! brew coffee for a cause

Published:Friday | June 28, 2019 | 12:24 AM
It’s all smiles as Deaf Can! Coffee Barista Wadia Barnes (left) presents Tamii Brown, Salada Foods Jamaica commercial and corporate affairs manager, with a sample of the special Jamaica Mountain Peak Nitro Cold Coffee brew made for the Father’s Day edition of the Everyone’s a Winner the Best Dressed Chicken 5K, 10K & 3K road race to on Sunday, June 16, at Hope Gardens. The Jamaica Association for the Deaf was one of the charity partners for the event.
Contributed Photo
It’s all smiles as Deaf Can! Coffee Barista Wadia Barnes (left) presents Tamii Brown, Salada Foods Jamaica commercial and corporate affairs manager, with a sample of the special Jamaica Mountain Peak Nitro Cold Coffee brew made for the Father’s Day edition of the Everyone’s a Winner the Best Dressed Chicken 5K, 10K & 3K road race to on Sunday, June 16, at Hope Gardens. The Jamaica Association for the Deaf was one of the charity partners for the event.

Salada Foods Jamaica, through its Jamaica Mountain Peak brand, joined forces with Deaf Can! Coffee in a strong show of support for the Jamaica Association for the Deaf (JAD).

The JAD and its programmes were at the forefront as the organisation was one of two charity partners selected for the 2019 Father’s Day edition of the Everyone’s A Winner Best Dressed Chicken 10K, 5K and 3K event held at Hope Gardens, St Andrew.

According to Tamii Brown, Salada Foods Jamaica commercial and corporate affairs manager, the partnership with Deaf Can! Coffee was an extension of Salada’s commitment to rise up and support Jamaica.

“The deaf community is an integral part of who we are as a society; with all of our unique facets, we are, at the core, Jamaicans,” Brown said.

“It is important that each member of the Jamaican society is not marginalised, but better yet, empowered. What Deaf Can! has done is exactly that; they have broken down any perceived barriers of abilities and have said, ‘Look at us, we can’,” Brown added.

Under the Jamaica Mountain Peak booth, Deaf Can! Coffee, represented by co-founder Blake Widmer with baristas Wadia Barnes and Javannie Dawes, offered crowd-pleasing Jamaica Mountain Peak Nitro cold-coffee brews.

“As the hot beverage sponsor for this event, Running Events co-founders connected us with Deaf Can! knowing that our energies and mindsets would be well aligned. Today, we have definitely shown that together, we all can include and empower,” Brown said.

“It was truly a pleasure to work alongside the very capable Deaf Can! team. We are honoured to have the capacity to rise up and support our coffee family in this unique format,” Brown said, indicating that there will be more collaboration in the future.

Deaf Can! Coffee is a social enterprise that started when a group of deaf teen boys from the Caribbean Christian Centre in Kingston went on a field trip to meet a deaf coffee farmer in Top Hill, St Elizabeth. According to Widmer, it only took that spark.

“We didn’t have the desire to have a business, but we wanted our youth to have confidence in themselves. Most people define a deaf person by what they can’t do; the youth internalise that. They grow up feeling like, ‘I am deaf, I can’t do anything,’” Widmer said.