Christina Longden admits it’s hard to stay focused!

There’s so much happening for the 41-year-old Netherton mother-of-two who manages to combine family life with her role as director of registered charity The Lorna Young Foundation.

She’s also embarking on a new business venture and is pursuing a love of writing which has resulted in the publication of her first novel.

During a varied career, Christina has advised the Blair government on housing policy, worked among the impoverished Kalahari tribespeople in Namibia and helped train young people in this country to become entrepreneurs with a conscience – making “a decent” profits, but paying much more than lip service to the idea of ethical trading.

Christina, who hails from Stalybridge, started out wanting to be a journalist, but after university ended up getting a sponsorship for a place on a course to fast-track candidates into management roles in local government.

She worked in social housing, seeing first hand the poverty and problems besetting people on housing estates in the Greater Manchester area, before becoming an adviser on housing policy to the Blair government.

Christina moved into the field of international development after her husband-to-be, Ian, decided to go to Africa, – and she decided to go too.

“I left the UK in 2002 to go to Namibia, which was strangely very similar to the work I had been doing on council estates,” she says. “It was on a dramatically different level, but it also involved poverty, people struggling and facing neglect.

“I worked with the Kalahari bushmen, who are the worst-oppressed tribal people in the world. Like the native Americans and the Austalian aborigines, they have problems of poverty and alcohol dependency and are struggling to preserve their traditions.”

One of Christina’s proudest achievements was to bring together tribal elders from all over southern Africa to collect their stories, translate them into Afrikaans and English and preserve their oral histories in two books – before they risk being lost for ever as the younger generation abandon their traditions and move into the towns.

Christina and Ian’s daughter Ruby was born in Namibia and was able to say words in the Kalahari “click” language before she learned them in English.

After four years in Africa, the family returned to the UK, where Christina went back to her former career, but found things had changed.

“It wasn’t the same sort of civil service,” she says. “People had always been career-minded, but now they were more so. I had been working in a world where just to survive was an achievement and there was death on the doorstep every day. I didn’t feel motivated any more and I decided to look for a new challenge.”

The challenge came with the Lorna Young Foundation, billed as the only ethical trading charity in the UK to operate internationally.

Ian and Christina both got involved in the foundation, which aims to tackle poverty in developing countries by assisting smallholder producers through business education and support, access to markets and peer networking.

Its programmes include a radio system which provides smallholder farmers with the information they need to manage their crops effectively. The system enables them to put questions to the foundation, which provides them with access to answers from experts in the field. It is currently working with Kenyan and Ethiopian coffee farmers and women cocoa growers in the Congo.

“We give business advice to the poorest producer groups,” says Christina. “We advise farmers on such things as how to apply for Fairtrade certification, the best way to manage a co-operative and how to get access to markets.

“These are countries that are heavily reliant on imports. In Uganda, farmers are drinking tea that has been imported – even through the country grows tea itself.

“Now for £100 they can buy packing equipment and drive around the villages selling tea.”

The foundation also set up the Oromo Coffee Company, an ethical trading social enterprise launched in 2008 with a group of refugees from Ethiopia who had settled in Ashton-under-Lyne.

The company is owned and run by members of the Oromo community as a not-for-profit business importing and selling high-quality Ethiopian coffee.

Other foundation programmes include Not Just a Trading Company, a community enterprise programme offering groups of young people opportunities to create their own social enterprises selling tea, coffee, chocolate, rice and beauty products – and allow them to make a decent profit while making sure producer groups also benefit.

Christina is passionate about “fairer trade” and is a firm believer that businesses can be both profitable and ethical – benefiting as many people as possible.

She also believes in grasping opportunity when it comes. “Life is short and people should work doing something they love,” she says. Work is such a big part of your life.

“The more you think solely about the money, the more you worry about impressing the right people the less successful you become. We don’t need the philosophy of ‘what’s in it for me?’”

While Christina is kept busy with her work for the foundation, she is also exercising her entrepreneurial spirit by setting up a business closer to home.

Christina and Ian lead a small team running Dark Woods Coffee from spacious converted textile premises at West Slaithwaite Road, Marsden.

The firm roasts coffee supplied by the same producers helped through the Lorna Young Foundation, while plans are well under way to introduce barista training and open a coffee shop which will also be a focal point for community groups, including artists and authors.

“Dark Woods Coffee is complementary to what we are already doing,” she says. “The Colne Valley is really moving with things like the Marsden Jazz Festival, arts festivals and the Real Ale Trail.

“We want the coffee shop to be a community hub – somewhere people feel it belongs to them.”

There’ll also be space for a small book stall promoting loal authors.

Christina’s first novel, Mind Games and Ministers – a darkly comic novel drawing on her experiences of the Westminster bubble, was published earlier this year by Bluemoose, based at Hebden Bridge.

Hoping that she doesn’t comer across “all Hebden Bridge”, she says: “I love to write. I joined a writers’ group when I moved to Netherton and they have been so encouraging. I grew up believing that unless you could be a journalist, there’s no point in writing.”

How Christina proved them wrong.

Role: Director

Age: 41

Family: Married to Ian with daughter Ruby, nine, and Gregory, six

Cars: A Fiat Panda and a Skoda Yeti

Holidays: We have recently got back from a visit to Namibia. We love to go to Whitby and Bolton Abbey and we also have a canal boat

First job: I worked in Burney’s Bakery in Ashton-under-Lyne

Best thing about the job? Having the freedom to grow an idea that will benefit as many people as possible, including myself!

Worst thing about the job? Trying to keep focused

Business tip: You have to be open to learning and listening. The people I admire in business are the ones who are open to new ideas

Work: Registered charity helping smallholder producers in developing countries and communities in the UK

Site: Netherton

Phone: 07944 979721

Email: projectmanager@lyf.org

Web: www.lyf.org.uk

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