It’s the biggest ever year for our supplier grant scheme – so we’ve asked our trainee Commodities Buyers Becky Mundy and Jamie Ball, who are managing the project, to tell you a bit more about it:

Every year Yorkshire Tea – and our sister company Taylors of Harrogate – supports our long standing tea and coffee suppliers with a grant scheme for social and environmental projects taking place within the communities in which we operate.

We received a fantastic response from our suppliers to the 2013 Grant Scheme and as a result we will be supporting 52 projects, totalling over £110,000 of funds that will go towards a wide range of excellent projects.

For each project, the supplier themselves will equally match our contribution, furthering the reach of each grant and cementing their own relationships with their communities. We are committed to schemes such as this because we believe our relationships with suppliers should go beyond a simple business relationship, ensuring we maintain our shared values together.

Over the next few months we will focus on some of the fantastic initiatives we will be supporting in more detail. But for now, here’s a brief idea of some of the projects we will be helping make possible.

Some of the social projects include the construction of a classroom for first grade children of workers at Nandi Tea in Kenya, helping to complete a community medical facility at Kionyo in Kenya, the construction of a crèche at Guadalupe Zaju Farm in Mexico (that's it in the picture above) and the contribution toward a year’s running costs of a primary school, secondary school and agricultural college for 180 children based on La Bastilla coffee farm in Nicaragua.

Environmental projects funded through the scheme will include enabling farmers to carry out a recycling project at Pangoa coffee cooperative in Peru, the procurement and distribution of 200 Energy Saving Wood Stoves to small holder producer families at Igara tea in Uganda, alongside an irrigation water project at Makomboki in Kenya.

In conjunction with our Yorkshire Rainforest Project, we will be able to increase the scope of our tree planting initiative across projects in Kenya, Malawi and Rwanda.

As the projects progress over the next few months we’ll be focusing on several in more detail.