Inside the Jewel Vault with Cristina Villegas

Cristina Villegas	Cristina as a little girl	Debra Navarro ring stack
Anna Moltke-Huitfeldt Ring	Jennifer Dawes emerald & rubellite earrings	GemFair artisanal diamond miner
Moyo zircon in ring by Rebecca Overman	Moyo Gems mined by Salma, cut by Beth Stier

 

JCC         Cristina Vilegas is a leading figure advancing good governance in the artisanal and small scale mines to market sector. About 20% of the diamonds and gold we buy, and 80% of the sapphires are amongst the minerals mined informally by an estimated forty five million people world-wide, some of whom earn less than two dollars a day. Whilst it's a hugely important source of minerals and metals globally, it traps communities in a cycle of poverty based in Washington D. C. Christina is director of responsible sourcing and minerals at Pact, a respected global NGO, advancing development and sustainability, and her projects range from mining safety in Indonesia to child labour in gold mining in Columbia, via many projects in African nations, including the pioneering Moyo Gems Women social enterprise in Tanzania. Welcome, Christina. I can't wait to see what you have for us inside the Jewel Vault!

CMV      Thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure. I'm looking forward to talking about gems and finished jewellery with you in addition to you know how we got there.

JCC         So can we travel back a bit in time, to your childhood? Where were you brought up? Where's home for you?

CMV      I am a Californian

JCC         And your parents were involved at all in public policy or or in any of the things that could have influenced you? Do you think?

CMV      Yes, So my father is an environmental research scientist. Yes,

JCC         Ah, right,

CMV      That's where it comes from. Good probing. so yes, he's actually an entomologist, so, which means he's he studies insects and he would

CMV      literally bring his work home with him. so,

JCC         No!

CMV      A lot of my fondest memories are actually the whole family being out in the patio and counting thousands of weevils and they’re beneficial insects for different counties in California. So I'm not scared of insects because you can't be raised in that household. And then I also spend a lot of time outdoors, so I have a lot of I like to call them bush skills. So, camping and how to start a fire and all that stuff.

JCC         Yeah, so I can imagine the that the field experiences you've had that must have been handy. And what about your Mum or your grandparents were there any sort of balancing factors to do with sparkly things like that? No, no jeweller in the background, then?

CMV      No jeweller, but my mother, she’s a Food and Drug Inspector for the state of California, so I definitely benefited from her having a very strong, female role in my in the household.

JCC         Definitely, I was just going to say that's always really strong. So, you haven't had any jewellery experiences that had a lasting impression on you as a child then?

CMV      No, actually, not - but it's something I've come to love just through exploring the sector and being around you know artist types and that's…

JCC         Passionate people

CMV      yeah, passionate people, who, are creators and it's hard not to be inspired by them.

JCC         So let's get straight into your Vault, shall we? I've you know, looking over the beautiful things you've selected for us is a strong theme,

CMV      Colour,

JCC         Which is

CMV      Colour and sparkle.

JCC         Well, yeah, I was apart from the colour and the sparkle, there is a beautiful theme running through about female makers, about ethical considerations, about the sourcing stories behind these gems. Tell us about the first piece in your Vault?

CMV      Yeah, the first piece is from a designer named Debra Navarro.  She actually has no idea that I included her work, so will be a surprised to her,

JCC Quite right!

CMV But she knows I'm a big fan because I'm all over her Instagram, and so I chose this because she names all her jewellery pieces after the miner who mined it, and so not only is she extremely talented with her design, I love like she uses, rough stones, I love her aesthetic. It's like a natural kind of organic, not polished aesthetic, she uses, bright colours, which you know as the one who's Latin. I really appreciate her bold colour choice.

JCC         Mhm, vibrancy,

CMV      but you know she uses gems from places that she's visited and for miners that she's met and it really honours the miner so that's the first piece

JCC         That's wonderful. Thank you so much for explaining this because you sent me a photograph of this. is actually a stack of very colourful rings so I just love this story and I hadn't realized until you told me, I hadn't heard of this designer, and I hadn't seen any of her pieces. But it is just wonderful that direct line and the honouring as you as you've explained.

CMV      yeah

JCC         you must see it. You must see a lot of this gender support in your work. It's I know it's something that you worked on in your double masters?

CMV      yeah, I've been interested in gender issues, as they intersect with health with natural resources with you know with community development, but the last few years I've really decided to focus on women miners in particular, because they're about one third of all miners worldwide and people have no idea, and I always tell the miners “I admire you. This is hard work.” And It's not meant in like a patronizing way in any way, it's meant that I truly admire them because they are providing for their families and it is very hard work. and it's out of a deep respect that I focus on them.

Um, not what a lot of people know this, but I actually had breast cancer a few years ago.

JCC         Oh, gosh

CMV      Yeah, and I was leading the mining program with a colleague of mine, and when I was recovering, it was stage two and so I

JCC         Oh, I'm so sorry, Christina. What an ordeal.

CMV      My, my boss at the time she was like, Yeah, I'm good. I'm cancer free. I'm just being watched closely, and after my treatment, my active treatment was done,  my boss at the time was saying, you know, you're gonna need a year to recover, at least, from everything

JCC         What a brilliant boss!

CMV      Yeah. She's like a sister to me, and she said, you know all I want you to do is focus on what you love and I know you love jewellery. And so how about you just focus on that?  And I was like Okay!  So that's actually why I'd been able to focus so much on jewellery is because I had that space.  

I have to tell you like, when I was undergoing treatment, I kept, and it was. This might sound strange, but I kept thinking about the women I work with who are in far flung areas who would have no idea they had cancer and you know cancer affects - breast cancer - affects one in every seven women, worldwide, and out of that one in at one and every six that are diagnosed will have it under forty, which I was thirty-six when I was diagnosed. So I just kept thinking how lucky I was of course that we found it so early but also how lucky I was, and I was in Washington, D.C. and being treated at Georgetown University and what a privilege that was, to get that kind of health care that would save my life.

But Mary, who is working underground, who also might have this has no idea, and that just kept coming back to me, which is kind of reinforced, my focus on women just because of that really deeply personal experience. And Mary is actually one of the first few people I met in the Umba Valley and Mary and I do not speak the same language. She does not speak a word of English. I speak very little Swahili but somehow we're like best of friends, whenever, I see her again I get a huge hug.

I guess I'm under no allusions that you know the privilege that I've had and I guess there's also like I feel like there's the obligation, to then work with others, you know, who have who have their own dreams and you know, my role is to help break down barriers.

JCC         Thank you so much for sharing that.  

And the second piece again is on your same theme of gender - and fairmined and ecological. So please tell us what's your second piece in your vault.

CMV      Yeah, it gets back to this idea of you know, you kind of meet interesting people on your journey and the second piece is by a designer, she's in Denmark, her name's Anna Moltke-Huitfeldt, but this piece in particular, I just like how it's like the sides. It's the sides are kind of folded in, so it looks like a little gift and you have

JCC          Yes, Yes, you are right.

CMV       this beautiful stone. I'm assuming its could, probably pink tourmaline. I can't remember, but it's yeah.. It's set in, a Fairmined Ecological Gold ring. Ecological Fairmined Gold is literally the highest standard of gold in the world, and she’s someone I haven't met in person, but who’s amongst my friends, now on Facebook, and Instagram and Twitter.  And I hope to meet her one day.

JCC          Yeah, I'm sure, Thanks to the connections of social media, it's great isn’t it? So tell us about Fair Mined and Eco Gold. What makes one better than the other?

CMV       Yeah. Sure, so Fairmined Gold and Fair-Trade Gold used to be the same thing. It was the Fairmined Gold Organization. It's an outfit in Columbia, called the Alliance for Responsible Mining. They had teamed up with Fair Trade International and they created this beautiful standard called The Fairmined Gold and Fair Trade Standard, that has since divided to two separate standards.  It doesn't really matter which one you choose. I work a lot with ARM, the Alliance for Responsible Mining.

I mean one of the particular cool things about Fairmined Gold is that it was started by a bunch of college students in Columbia.  They were working with some indigenous communities and Afro Columbian communities in Columbia, who had traditionally mined gold and who are interested in going mercury-free. I talked to one of the founders and she said, ‘We didn't know it hadn't been done before.  We just did it.’  And I can relate to that. And so I appreciate Fairmined Gold, the spirit of being change makers, proving things are possible. So Fairmined Gold is a beautiful, very high standard to reach, and then Eco-Gold is an even higher standard. It's going completely mercury-free. So one of the ways that Fairmined Gold works is that they reward the miners for reaching these high standards with better prices with a guaranteed minimum price. So no matter if the price of gold goes up and down, they have a guaranteed minimum, and then for those miners who've achieved the very difficult task of going mercury free, they reward them with even higher price, in the in the Eco Gold designation.

JCC         And how is this funded?  Do they get funding in so that they can guarantee that the reserves will be met?  So that they can ensure stability?  Because you know you can't leave communities like this at, the other end of the value chain in the lurch?  You have to have long term commitments in place.

CMV        They it charge a higher price called a premium, that then goes back to the communities in the form of a community development grant to focus on things like what the community prioritizes.  So like wells or education or things like that, but they also attract philanthropic grants, the Inter-American Development Bank or major brands will fund them cause. We also have a very similar model in Moyo, where a part of our operations are funded by our trading activities, but then the other part - the social programs - are actually funded by philanthropy.  So we have a grant from the Tiffany Company Foundation, to fund economic empowerment groups in the Moya footprint. We also have a grant from the World Bank to focus on help and safety initiatives to the Moyo miners. That kind of thing.  So it's a mix of both, private market finance through your commercial activities, in charging fees and things like that, but then also the philanthropic side, and we can do that because we're a non-profit.

JCC         Yeah, well it's genius. It is a very creative way to fix this issue.

CMV       Well, it's also, it's also a legal issue in some cases, I'm being really really blunt, for those kind of mainstream companies that are maybe listening. Yeah, you know it's responding to growing consumer interests that's been well documented in sustainability, but it's also responding to increasing legal obligations that that you know major markets like the E U are putting into place. So the E U has different due diligence requirements now to if you want to serve that market.  So if you want to sell in France or Belgium, you have to deal with human rights due diligence now, you have to abide by the conflict minerals laws of which gold is a conflict mineral.  So if you aren’t abiding you're actually breaking the law. So we at Moyo we think about that story that we’re telling as adding beauty to a product and responding to consumer demand, but we're also fulfilling due diligence expectations. So understanding who's financing that mine, where the profit's going? Is it going to an armed group? Luckily, not in this case, Tanzania is a stable place, and the Tonga area where we operate is extremely safe and stable, but you know like Afghanistan and Myanmar, these are real issues about are problematic government's benefiting from natural resources?  And what's the jewellery sector's role in that?  These - are all difficult questions, so it doesn't mean you can't source from there, just means you have to be extra careful. So, you know these responsible sourcing initiatives, might have started off kind of in the kind of “Do-gooder” spirit, but now it's actually legal expectation in a lot of markets.

JCC         Tell me if I'm completely wrong, is to, if you can't stretch to the Fairmined logo or Fair Trade logo, is to go to a noted bullion merchant, a market like the London Bullion Market, where you know there isn't there is a high standard - huge burden - on due diligence to ensure that the gold is being mined from countries that meet these criteria.  Is that correct?

CMV       That's right. So, at the very minimum, the very least folks who are sourcing gold should make sure that the vendor’s on the good delivery list of the L. B. M. A. the London Bullion Market Association, so it's not perfect. So, there are still some issues in Dubai trading chains, for example, and the issues are conflict gold being exported as recycled, being imported as recycled and everybody knows it's not recycled. Everybody knows it's conflict gold.  So, there are increasing pressure in the Dubai gold markets to address this.

It's been an open secret for a long time, and so I often warn, well, everyone who will listen ‘‘Don't be fooled by claims of recycled gold. It might not be recycled at all’’.  So and then also you know by using recycled, you know, if it's certified, that's a beautiful choice and I believe in choices, but it doesn't keep you involved in the mining conversation, and that's one thing that as, you know, as we kind of move towards, you know, a reduced emissions economy we should stay involved with these discussions about how mining is done, and the way you stay involved is buying the responsible stuff, and providing that demand signal.

So I encourage companies, you know, to if they're going to buy newly mined material make sure it's from responsible sources, and then you can mix with certified recycled and newly mined responsibly mined material. That's the best way to kind of keep the halo, the ‘Golden Halo’ firmly above you.

JCC         And avoid the dreaded greenwash!

CMV       Correct.

JCC          So you know, just to just to keep on this topic, you can apply the same argument to people who have spurned natural diamonds over lab grown

CMV       Correct.

JCC          diamonds. You know this is also a topic that you know people need to be involved in and gain insight in because just saying ‘‘Oh, I only ever buy lab grown’’ doesn't mean that the problem’s gone away, or that hardship doesn't exist or injustice doesn't exist, and ecological issues.

CMV      Well lab grown has its own problems.  They use a tremendous amount of energy, to create them. I think those issues will be solved in the future, its energy use, but my problem is its current claims of being green, because they pretend that energy, that tremendous energy usage hasn’t happened and they pretend like by slapping an offset on it, the problem has gone away.  You can slap an offset on anything, you know, so it doesn't mean that act didn’t happened in the first place.  

My other issue, which I'm sure you've seen in my commentary, in social media and elsewhere, is by choosing lab grown, you're prioritizing jobs in the Global North over jobs in the Global South. So you are, you are moving away from from supporting rural livelihoods and responsible mining where it exists, and you're shifting, you know, the, your money towards the Global North which does not need your money, thanks very much! We need engagement in places that have traditionally mined, or if you do, decide to prioritize lab grown for a cost reasons, which I get that, what are you doing to help transition these traditional mining communities to new sources of energy or new jobs? Just walking away just creates all these problems that big brands don't often acknowledge in honest ways.

JCC      Yeah, it’s just shutting the door on the issue, isn’t it.

CMV      Correct.

JCC       Well, well back to the vault,

CMV      Okay, back to shiny objects.

JCC       But honestly yeah, but it is. This is one of the reasons why I was so excited you accepted my invitation to join us. Because it, just you know what you have to say about this issue is so worth listening to.  And the insights just even from five minutes of listening to you leaves you that much richer. So thank you.

CMV       Well, thank you.

JCC        So, item three, tell us about your choice for this.

CMV      So item three is by a designer, named Jennifer Dawes, and it's - she, again it’s this the strong, woman aesthetic, bright colours.  And she's actually one of the first people I met in the industry. There's two stores in particular in the U. S. that I love visiting, one’s called Robert Goodman's store in Indiana, and they, kind of live and breathe, social justice values.  And then the other store I want to mention is Steve Quick Gallery. It's in Chicago, they host a number of designers. And so I wanted to make sure just to throw them some love. Because they actually support the Moyo program. In full disclosure they give us, some funding every year. So thank you to those two jewellery shops.

JCC         Yeah, yeah, so tell us about this beautiful piece by Jennifer Dawes.  I was reading a bit about her. She’s not somebody who's on my radar here in in London, in the U. K, But I see that she's at the forefront of the green movement, quite apart from the fact that she has a fantastic use of colour and form.  And these earrings are just amazing. I've not seen anything quite like them. There's a really bright rubellite at the top - is it rubellite?

CMV       Yes, and then with emeralds

JCC         Yes, and then a lovely long pair sort of scissor cut emeralds are separated by three diamonds, and they again set in yellow gold so they’re very lush, very vibrant. Very… They look amazing. So, what is it about them? Apart from the colour? Have you tried these on?

CMV      I have not tried them on. I cannot afford them, but yeah, I love the colour. I love design, the aesthetic and then you know Jennifer.  I, you know, I talked to her about her responsible sourcing journey, and she said, you know, when I became a mother, I just realized that everything needs to change, the way, you know, the materials I'm using you know, I really think about the future of the planet.  So I just really love how Jennifer's very clear that the status quo is not good enough and that we have to, you know, live our values and demand better. So she's actually one of the first designers who started using Moyo Gems you know leaders like her and you know how important jewellery industry leadership is in really making these initiatives possible.

JCC          Yeah, it's wonderful that responsibility to and care that she demonstrates as well, just in using this art form. 

And item four…  we don't actually have a specific item, so you can have a parcel if you like! Tell us what they are. Tell us what it’s a parcel of?

CMV       Yes, So I listed – it’s on my wish list, I guess so I want a parcel of GemFair diamonds, and GemFair is this beautiful initiative in Sierra Leone, that is run by De Beers, which may be surprising to some folks, but I am so happy it’s De Beers, because they really leaned into this initiative. They, were asked by Diamond Development Initiative, which is a non profit, to help them export diamonds because they were having difficulty getting diamonds out of Sierra Leone and De Beers, of course, knows how to do that. And then they realized that there's a really beautiful story here.  A beautiful story about what can happen when you work with artisanal miners and help them mine better, you have these beautiful community stories that you can tell.  And so, what De Beers has done, is fund this on a philanthropic basis, they are not making money, they've only started exporting because they wanted to make sure that their standards were up to, you know, De Beer’s expectations, which are quite high.

GemFair artisanal diamond miner, image courtesy of GemFair

JCC          Mhm, scrutiny.

CMV      Yeah exactly, also, just given the legacy issues of De Beers, they need to be watched very carefully.  So good for them, for you know, recognizing that and good for them for making sure that anything with their name on it is real and very proper. So yes, so they only started exporting, I think in 2021 and that's why, I don't actually have a picture of the product, but I think it's being made into some beautiful you know finished pieces.

JCC         Well, I hope so this is something I've been following myself personally but I'm surprised to hear that De Beers isn't making anything from this, and actually am a little alarmed because if there's nothing in it for De Beers, then there seems that you know how will this continue? How does a program like this get legs?

CMV      I would not want to speak for them but that's one reason that I make sure to praise them publicly because it's a scary place you know working with artisanals, sometimes, there's just association of social conflict, there's association of poverty trap, and usually artisanal miners are just rural people trying to make a living.  It's usually just village, you know, folks from the village, men and women. We have this, especially in Sierra Leone, of course we have this blood diamond connotation. Sierra Leone’s a beautiful place. I was - I had been in Liberia before I had gone to Sierra Leone, and Liberia at the time, it was about ten years ago, people's PTSD – post-traumatic stress disorder - was really visible in Liberia, and then I was expecting very similar in Sierra Leone, but it was so relaxed. People were so friendly.  I was in both gold mining areas and diamond mining areas and it was a really lovely place.  And so, I think you know, this - that Blood Diamond movie was, I think, useful in consumers wanting you know, wanting more from the jewellery sector. At the same time, it was negative because I think folks still have this perception that artisanal mining is a bunch of, you know young men, illegally working and nothing good can come of it, when actually it can be you know a really truly beautiful story when you lean in.

JCC         So we have 4 gorgeous selections in your fantasy vault now, Cristina – a stack of bright coloured G rings by Debra Navarro, a ring by Danish designer Anna Huitfeldt, and one of the first parcels ever of GemFair diamonds, and so to item 5!  And this is another ring and this is set with one of the Moyo Gems that are closest to your heart, and the colour of this gem is just amazing.

CMV      The colours - the colours that we get in Umba – it’s like a rainbow. We have, you know, beautiful pinks and purples. This is more like an orange kind of sunset colour.

JCC         And it's a zircon

CMV      Yeah, exactly we got a lot of different things there.  We get rubies and sapphires of all different colours.  We get zircons, we get amethyst and green tourmalines.  We even got emeralds very very strangely once, and I was suspicious, but they know it was true.  So it's like walking on a rainbow up there! They've been digging in Umba for decades, and things are still coming out of the soil, so it's a special place.

JCC          Yeah. So tell us about Moyo Gems.  So just explain what the inspiration for Moyo is and who’s involved.

CMV      Yeah, sure, so Moyo means heart in Kiswahili which is the dominant language in East Africa, so but it also means Life in a language called Shona and a language called Chinyanja which is Malawian, and Shona is Zimbabwe. So we chose Moyo because it means gems from the heart and they're very special, and also it's easy to say, and the domain was available online, so everything kind of came into place, but Moyo began from another program that was a collaboration with the Gemological Institute of America, GIA. GIA had approached Pact, because they knew my previous work in diamonds and they knew that we specialise in reaching ASM (artisanal & small mining) communities in far flung places, and measuring our work and being very easy to work with. So, they approached Pact with an idea on an education program for gem miners, and the reason they wanted to focus on education was the GIA’s field gemmologists kept coming back with the same observation.  They you know they go out to document new discoveries of gemstones and they kept saying, you know, the people who mine these gems know the least about them. They are being taken advantage of and they don't know what they have and sometimes they don't really know what it's used for.  I know it's kind of shocking, but you know, that it's used for jewellery, is not always known to miners. And I know, it's, again, it's shocking, but it's true.

So they created this very simple book and approached me with it already done and said, Hey, we want to see if this is actually useful and then we get feedback and then we make it better and I said  Yeah, If you know anything that improves the market skills of these miners I'm onboard with it. Let's do it, but I said hey, can we start with women?  Because if you don't start with women, you never get to gender parity.  They're always an afterthought and women are the most invisible of all miners around the world.  And it means that they get the fewest training opportunities because people don't think they're miners.  And so they're always like forgotten.  And so GIA said “Sure”  Actually, Robert Weldon said, “If there’s a problem, let solve it.” and I said “Okay, let's do it.” 

Well.  These ladies that we’re meeting in the Umba valley, they were amazing students and they were so lovely.  And we get big hugs from them and they also have really interesting stories about being you know, a woman head of household in a patriarchal society, and then just the gender bias we were revealing in the course of our engagement with them I think it should really capture the jewellery industry's attention because you know as someone who works with miners, with people who mine, I get invited to a lot of workshops in the U. S., people like I'm kind of unusual, so they liked hearing about the mining stories from me, so I was I was telling the stories of these ladies and the question I kept getting was “Cristina, these women mine rubies and sapphires and tourmalines and garnets, these are stones that we use all the time.  Can we buy from them?  These are beautiful stones.  And this area is known”, and so I was thinking. How can we pull this off? I know nothing about gem marketing. I know nothing about that. I know a lot about mining, and then, the gemmologist that we had hired for the GIA program happened to be at S.E.V with Monica Stevenson of Anza Gems and he had turned to her, and he said “You know Monica. All these ladies need is someone to buy their gems” and Monica's like “Hm”!

So she and I actually met in Chicago, at the Chicago Responsible Jewelry Conference and we actually both had the same grand plan in mind. Let's team up, and Stuart Pool of Nineteen48, he's British, and he saw us talking, and he’s like “I don't know what you're talking about, but I want to be involved!”  So he always jokes that he gate crashed our conversation.

JCC          I'll have to tease him

CMV       Yeah,

JCC         about that, next time I speak to him.

CMV       and so I always tease him, I’m like we would have come to him eventually because he's also sourcing from Tanzania at the time. So, Monica, Stewart, and I, all went to Tanzania, with my colleague, Norbert Messai, who’s Tanzanian, and we met up with TWMA, the Tanzanian Women Miners Association and said you know, can we meet with your members so I can talk about this idea?  And so we met with the ladies and said, Hey, would you be interested in a gemstone sourcing program that's built around you and they looked at each other and they're like…

JCC          What's the trick?

CMV      Ah, yes, duh. Of course we would.  So we sat in this like old school house with like peeling paint on the walls, and we had like a village lunch for everyone, and we co-designed this program to talk about to really respond to their needs, to the pain points and how often they wanted – how they wanted to be paid. And because we asked them things like, would you want to be paid in cash, or would you want to be paid in, like, mobile money, and they said mobile money. We said why? They’re like “Security.” 

I mean, we also learn things like they're only being paid half what they owed by the local brokers, because the brokers didn't have much cash, and so they would pay him half, and then sometimes they would run off and not pay them the other half when it was sold.  

So, we learned a lot, along the way.  We had customer service surveys at the end of the process so that we could continue to be miner centred and respond to their needs and their experiences and get better. And so yeah. The cool news about Moyo is that it's expanding.  We moved from ninety miners, from the beginning to four hundred.  Now now it's sixty percent women, forty percent men. We've allowed men in because they were getting very upset that they were not allowed in the program, and we realized it's actually a security issue and we didn't want to have any saboteurs so we decided to let the men under certain conditions.  They had to join TWMA and they have to be members of the women miners association and TWMA has certain rules saying that like men are allowed, but they're not allowed to run for office and they can't vote. So,

JCC         Right.

CMV      To make sure it's women run, so, we make it clear that ladies are in charge and one of the questions I get a lot is you know, in a patriarchal society are you causing harm? And we paid a lot of attention to this, luckily, we have not seen any pushback and because we have let men in, they're now invested in the program, in a program of success. So, we keep a very close eye on this by talking to TWMA by talking to the village leadership.  And we also have some security protocols that we follow and privacy protocols, we have as well.

JCC          Wow, it really is, I mean for such a pioneering project, it is already, you know, ticking all the best-in-class boxes, isn't it? So, it wouldn't be wonderful if this sort of project could be adapted around the globe.

CMV       That's what we're thinking, but we're trying to be very conservative with our growth because when we first announced Moyo, I was getting enquiries from Zimbabwe, Greenland, Brazil, Peru. But we realize that we need to make sure that the model works and so we were really focusing on making sure the Tanzanian model was really successful.  We’ve just achieved sustainability and we're getting more and more philanthropic grants. So our most recent grant was from the World Bank and we're expanding to Kenya, with the Women's Association on the Kenyan side, who's been watching from that side, and talking to me on the side saying please come to Kenya next.  So it's literally they share a border and it is the same gem belt, and share a border, same language, vastly different contexts. But with the World Bank funding we are starting small, doing a lot of learning because you can't just copy and paste something you have to you know, contextualize it. So they made their own rules on the Kenya side and we’ll be seeing if it works in the next few months.

JCC         Wow, how exciting. That's absolutely brilliant. So this is a fantastic way to start 2022

CMV      Thank you,

JCC         …with more of this. So you've chosen a reddish zircon ring, which is one of the gems from the Umba valley, and it's made by Rebecca, Rebecca Overman Jewelry, who is based in San Francisco, and again sold by Anza Gems, who you mentioned before. So what is it that appeals to you about this?  I can see a bit of a red theme going through, you like your reds, don't you?

CMV       I do, and yes, I prefer my pinks and reds, I like to blame my Latin heritage. I look good in red, so there you go.

JCC          Well, it’s perfect, no excuse needed. So

CMV       Yes,

JCC          Item six is beautiful again, like your item 4, which was a parcel of Gem Fair diamonds. You've chosen a parcel of rather beautiful juicy stones so tell us what they are.

CMV      Yes, I believe these are all garnets and these are mined by Salma, who is actually the leader of TWMA. She's a miner herself. And that's one of the reasons I love TWMA so much is because they're very grass roots. They're very passionate and they're led by miners and they're led by women. So, Salma always delivers these.  They're so like they're so beautiful like this kind of pinkish purple.  And it's just routine. She always brings them.  I can't get enough of them. They're beautiful.

JCC         No, they are beautiful.  The tones and shapes.   I see these ones are facetted by Beth Stier.

CMV       Yes

JCC          And is she somebody you know yourself?

CMV      I do yeah.  Beth is an amazing cutter she's based in, I think, Michigan, in the U S and the Midwest, and yeah, we happen to have like an all lady supply chain. It's really cool.  So Monica has made sure that all the Moyo stones are actually cut by Beth.  She's expanding, you know, her capacity. She has a few other cutters that she's bringing in, but I just think it's so cool that a stone that's mined by Salma, imported by Monica, cut by Beth and then sold to you know typically, female designers, you know, we accept men, too - we love men, love enlightened men - but it isn't that just so cool that you know something, the supply chain started off with a woman and also you know it has female hands throughout?

JCC          Yeah, and it ends up being pass from

JCC          woman to woman through its long

CMV       Correct.

JCC          long life. A piece of jewellery isn't just for one woman, it often lasts several generations doesn’t it?

CMV       Yup.

JCC          So out of these six amazing gems or parcels of gems and jewels, which would be the piece for you that you would want to keep safe forever, which would it be?

CMV      Oh, probably the last parcel, because you know it’s the collection of gems by Mary, Hadijah, and Salma, just because like these ladies have become friends of mine and and also, I guess the potential of what it could be made into.  I could keep dreaming about that, so I think I would keep them as like loose facetted stones,

JCC        Yes,

CMV       For me to kind of dream about.

JCC        And you could roll them around on your hand and dream about the different things you could make out of them.   Oh, Cristina! Wow I think what you do is utterly inspiring so thank you so much for sharing your time, and your life and career through these six fabulous objects. Thank you!

CMV       Thank you so much for having me it’s been a real pleasure.

 

-ENDS-

LINKS

Cristina Villegas Pact https://www.pactworld.org/leadership/cristina-villegas

Moyo Gems https://moyogems.com/

GemFair  https://gemfair.com/

Debra Navarro https://debranavarro.com/

Anna Huitfeldt https://www.moltke-huitfeldt.com/

Jennifer Dawes https://www.dawes-design.com/

Beth Stier https://www.instagram.com/stierbstier/