Transcriber: Anna Sobota Reviewer: Mujtaba Abdelwhab
Good afternoon, Chattanooga.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I'm a teacher, so I love that call and response.
I’m Ella Livingston and I’m so excited to be here with you guys today
and to share with you my story on a deeper, more intimate level.
Today, we're going to be looking at my heritage and my upbringing,
and how I honor the legacy
that my family has passed down to me through my company, Cocoa Asante.
So the first thing we want to do is define legacy.
It’s important to do that because we all want to start
from like a common place of understanding of what the word means.
So legacy, I guess in simple terms, means
anything passed down from one generation to the next.
We oftentimes think of this in terms of money, property, gifts, land,
but a legacy can be anything.
It doesn’t just have to be a tangible object.
Now, as I go through my talk today, there are three central questions
that I want you guys to think about as I go through my talk.
I’m actually going to answer these questions for myself.
The first question is, what legacies do you have in your family?
The second question, how have you fulfilled those legacies?
And the third question,
how have you broken those legacies in order to create a better future?
If you would asked me about 10 years ago,
what sort of legacy my family left me,
I probably would have shrugged my shoulders and said, nothing.
My family had actually immigrated to the U.S. about 25 years ago.
This is actually my dad, right there, in that big fur jacket.
If you’re familiar with a BMF, he looks like Big Meech to me.
Okay, a few of you guys got it, okay.
And then, there’s my mom right there, next to him.
Down there is my older brother in the red tracksuit.
He's actually here today, right there.
And then, there I am, dressed in hand-me-downs.
I actually wore my brother’s hand-me-downs until I was in the fifth grade.
I don’t know why my parents did that to me.
My parents immigrated to the U.S.
This was the day we landed in the Atlanta Airport.
They left everything.
They left everything in order to build or create a better opportunity
for their children.
My dad was a pastor at the time.
He had his own church.
My mom was a teacher and an artist.
They left all of that.
They left their home, their culture, they left their family.
They left that all to provide a better opportunity for the two of us.
Now, unfortunately, when they got here,
none of the credentials, that they had, were recognized.
Both of them had to start all over in terms of education.
Imagine that: you’re in your 30s,
you’ve got kids, you’ve got a thriving career,
mid- to senior-level in your careers,
and then, with just one move, you have to start all over.
They went back to school with college-age students.
They amassed a lot of student debt because as an international student,
there's not a lot of financial aid.
And then on top of that, after about 20 years of marriage,
they ended up getting a divorce.
To me, my parents didn’t have anything to give me.
They came here to fulfill their American dream,
but it had cost them so much.
What I didn’t realize 10 years ago that I do now though,
is that my heritage that was given to me simply because I was born from them
and the opportunities that they gave me because of the sacrifices they made
was so much richer than I knew.
In order to explain a little bit more about this legacy,
I’ll have to give you guys a background information on Ghana.
Ghana is known as a matriarchal society.
Did anybody know what that is?
Okay, great, okay.
I know it’s awesome because everything in the west is super patriarchal,
but Ghana´s matriarchal.
We understand the value of women
and that society does not run without them.
The best part is that inheritance is passed through the women.
That means that all the land in my family goes to the women.
In my country, we have about over 200 acres of land.
Some of that is used to farm cocao, coconut, herbs,
some we’ve built homes on,
and then, the rest sits unused.
Now, while anyone in our family can come in
and use the land for what they will,
the only ones, who have any legal rights to it, are the women.
There are very few women in our family who have the right to do so.
Case the point, let’s look at my mom.
My mom has three children.
My older brother, myself and my younger brother.
My older brother has no rights to anything.
And if they have daughters in the future,
their daughters also don't have any rights to anything.
Sorry about that, guys.
[Laugh]
Whereas I have all the rights to claim what my mother has passed down,
and my daughter can also claim what I have.
In my mom’s generation, there’s only two women;
I wish I could point but I got this clicker;
there’s only two women in my mom’s generation
who can claim our land.
In my generation, there’s only two of us.
In my daughter’s generation, there’s only three.
Now, this may not sound too bad,
but my mom has 12 brothers and sisters.
Each of them have an average of three kids
and they have kids as well.
Out of all of those generations, those three generations,
there’s only seven of us who have any legal claim to our land.
In this picture, in the top left,
this is my cousin on our farm.
In the bottom left, you see one of the harvest.
It is just a small section of the farm.
Here, you see the cacao being fermented in the sun.
This is where a lot of the flavor gets developed.
Gaia Cacao has like an earthy flavor.
A cacao from South America has like a fruity flavor,
and it all has to do with the soil, the sun and the whole process.
And then, this is what a cacao pod looks when it’s opened up.
Here you see the white pulp and inside is the seed.
[Image of three-to-bar chocolate making]
Understanding my place in my family made it important to me
to honor the legacy that was passed down to me from my family.
There’s not a lot of us, as I said earlier,
so I wanted to make sure that I did what was best for what we had.
If you’ve ever heard me speak about Cocoa Asante,
you’ve most likely heard me say that it’s my way of extending my family’s legacy.
For generations we have harvested, we’ve grown and we’ve dried cocao.
The issue is that
the entire process doesn’t receive much of the profits made in the cocoa industry.
Here’s actually the process of taking a cocao bean
all the way to the chocolate bar, which is called bean-to-bar.
Here you have the cocao grown on the tree,
the pot is cut off, inside the white pulp is then fermented in the sun.
You saw that picture earlier.
After that, it is dried.
It is then roasted.
Then, it is winnowed where the kind of shell is separated from the cocao nib.
Then, it’s ground up into small particles,
that’s where you add in the dry milk powder if you want to make milk-chocolate,
the sugar or whatever else you want to add in.
Then, it goes through a conching process,
which refines the particle into smaller pieces.
The finer the particles are, the smoother the taste.
Then, it’s tempered and poured into the chocolate mold.
And then, you get that end product, which is what we’re all familiar with.
The issue is that this entire top portion, which is what the farmers do,
only receives 6 % of all the revenues made in the chocolate industry.
Not only is this completely unfair,
but it isn't sustainable for them to have a livable wage.
My cousin, that you guys saw earlier, who manages the farm,
he has a full time job on top of what he does with our land
because it’s simply not enough.
My plan is to own an entire bean-to-bar company, both in Ghana and in the U.S.,
so that we can do two things.
A: we can pay our farmers a livable wage.
Then B: we can add value to the chocolate that’s exported in Ghana.
That way, we can improve and boost their economy.
This is the way that I plan to honor what was passed down to me from my family.
Having a fully integrated vertical company will allow me to do that.
Now, my story doesn't stop there.
In April of last year, my husband and I welcomed our daughter,
Belarue Aquia Livingston.
There she is.
I wish you could be here with us today, but she talks a lot,
so I didn’t want her in the audience.
Because of her, as the late Nipsey Hussle said,
“the marathon continues.”
The torch that was passed down to me from my mom,
I get to pass down to her.
I cannot wait to see what she’s going to do with that.
Do you guys remember the three essential questions I asked earlier?
I’ve answered those questions as they pertain to me
and I want you to think of them as they pertain to you.
I want you to seriously think about this
because it was upon me thinking about these questions
that I was able to see just how much Cocoa Asante really tied into my legacy.
Before I was just going, going, going; then when I stopped, I was like, wow,
I’m really extending what my family does.
I’m really breaking generational curses.
The first question is, what legacies do you have in your family?
The second question, how have you fulfilled those legacies?
And the third question,
how have you broken those legacies in order to build a better future?
The things that we get from our family,
the things that we inherit from them, aren’t always good.
Breaking generational curses is an important aspect of legacy building.
Analyzing these three questions,
I hope that you see just how well you're setting yourself up,
as well as the generations that will proceed from you up for success.
Thank you.