On Saving the World with Behavior Analysis....and Coffee

By: Beth Garrison, CEO, BCBA

So in the last few weeks (inspired by a great discussion with RyanO aka "The Daily BA" check out his work here.), I really have been trying to nail down the vision for this company.  The mission has been there from the beginning: Helping people to serve amazing coffee, while promoting environmentally friendly and sustainable business practices.  Our mission focused on partnering with roasters who use Fair Trade Certified Coffee with environmentally friendly business practices (i.e. reduce, reuse, recycle).  

Lately, I've also been contemplating the vision of the company.  A little while ago, I posted this graphic on LinkedIn (kind of proud of it since it was my first experience with photoshop....graphic artists don't hate me, but as a behavior analyst I don't typically need to create graphics for marketing purposes):

Inadvertently, without realizing it at the time, I think I created the vision of this company.  To create a platform for behavior analysts to share a cup of coffee with people who may not know about our science, and then share the label and what we do.  

So how does this "Save the World?"  One of B.F. Skinner's questions for our field was to ask "why are we not saving the world?"  I also echo this.  Why can't we?  We have a science and a technology to promote socially significant behavior, now our task is to disseminate this to the larger public who are not familiar with our science (or who, more often than not as I've discovered being an adjunct instructor in a psychology department), are not only not familiar, but they discuss our field and our studies without actually doing research in to what those works state.

Let's use coffee to help.

References:

Skinner B.F. Why we are not acting to save the world. In: Skinner B.F, editor. Upon further reflection. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall; 1987. pp. 1–14.