What Raise the Bar Helped Me Build: From a Big Idea to a Clearer Path for CSI

How the Raise the Bar Mentorship Alliance helped me refine my vision for The Cultivated Spirit Initiative.

There is a particular kind of challenge that comes with working on an idea you have carried for years.

You are not trying to figure out what you care about. You already know.

The harder question is how to make something that feels big, interconnected and deeply personal understandable enough for other people to engage with.

That was the question I carried into the Raise the Bar Mentorship Alliance.

The word that caught my attention when I first came across the programme was actually “alliance.” I have always believed that meaningful change in the beverage industry, and in agriculture too, requires more than individual businesses working in isolation. Growers, producers, bartenders, chefs, educators and the people who consume what we make are all part of the same system.

I was already working within that space when I applied to Raise the Bar. My work as Green Bartender had grown from a combination of agriculture and hospitality, and over time Garden to Glass had become the framework through which I connected the two.

That work led me to ask: What if every drink could be an ecological and cultural act?

That thinking led me toward something more specific: the Cultivated Spirit Initiative, or CSI.

CSI is an evolving education and outreach initiative designed to strengthen capacity across the Caribbean Garden-to-Glass Value Chain. The idea is to connect agricultural production, processing, beverage practice, cultural knowledge and ingredient literacy in ways that make knowledge more accessible and useful.

Much of the knowledge I was interested in already existed.  Farmers understood crops. Producers understood processing. Bartenders understood flavour and service. Communities carried cultural knowledge around ingredients and traditional preparations.  What was often missing was a way of connecting those pieces, documenting them and making them accessible to the next person.

I brought that emerging vision into Raise the Bar.

From toolkit to infrastructure

My original idea was a Garden-to-Glass Training & Sourcing Toolkit: a practical system to help beverage professionals work with local growers, understand ingredients, preserve and transform produce, reduce waste, and bring the stories of those ingredients into hospitality.

It wasn't meant to be another recipe book. It was about education, sourcing, preservation, storytelling and relationships across the value chain.

The problem was trying to explain all of that at once.  The vision was bigger than the sentence I had to describe it.

Raise the Bar gave me a structure in which I could work through that complexity. It didn't ask me to abandon the big idea. It gave me somewhere to pull it apart, look at the different pieces and decide what needed to come first.

Through the capstone process, I began to articulate the industry challenge more directly:

“The Caribbean beverage industry lacks accessible, structured education that reflects regional ingredients, cultural knowledge, and garden-to-glass practices.”

That moved CSI beyond the idea of a toolkit and toward educational infrastructure. The capstone took that idea toward a digital education platform and modular curriculum framework, designed not just to teach, but to create pathways for knowledge to be shared, practiced and passed on.

That also brought up the questions I still have to answer: Who is this for first? How does it reach people? How do you recruit participants? What makes the experience accessible? What happens after the first phase? How does an educational idea become something people actually participate in?

Those questions are still part of the work.

Making a big idea accessible

One of the most useful pieces of feedback I received came toward the end of the programme.

Lucia Creed, Raise the Bar's Founding Director, pointed to the way I used ginger beer in my capstone presentation as one of its strongest elements. For her, it showed that I could take something that sounded complicated and make it understandable through something familiar.

I'm glad that point came through.

Ginger beer is deceptively simple.

In the Caribbean, it is familiar. It is associated with home, family, Christmas and generations of people who grew up knowing the drink. Yet making it from ingredients is becoming less common as convenience increasingly replaces that kind of hands-on knowledge.

For me, that made ginger beer much more than a beverage project.  It was a way into ingredient literacy.

Ingredient literacy means understanding an ingredient beyond its name. Where does it grow? What does the plant look like? How does it taste at different stages? How is it processed? Who traditionally works with it? What cultural knowledge surrounds it? What happens when that knowledge disappears?

A Christmas drink made in a Caribbean kitchen can become a lesson in all of those things.  You can talk about fermentation, ingredients, preservation, agricultural knowledge, cultural history, hospitality, education and stewardship, and suddenly you have a very large conversation.

Or you can start with a glass.

That was one of the clearest things I took from the capstone process. I didn't need to explain the entire system before someone could understand what I was trying to do. Sometimes I could start with something people already knew and use that as the way in.

The first practical expression of the CSI capstone became a ginger beer fermentation module: an accessible entry point into ingredient transformation, fermentation and stewardship, while also testing the educational model itself.

Mentorship when the vision is already in motion

My mentor was Danny Childs, whose work through Slow Drinks and his wider approach to beverage culture I already knew before the programme.

Our relationship had begun through the Slow Food and Negroni Week world, so Raise the Bar did not introduce me to that part of my professional life. Instead, it gave an existing relationship a different and deeper context.

I wasn't looking for someone to tell me what I should be doing.  The vision was already fairly locked in.

Danny's role was more about challenging parts of the thinking, exposing me to what was happening across the wider bartender community, keeping me aware of opportunities and conversations I might otherwise have missed, and encouraging me to put myself forward.

He also stayed interested in the practical work alongside the larger vision.  Sometimes the feedback was as simple as, “Dude, great elevator pitch.” Those comments were useful because they gave me a sense of how the idea was landing outside my own head.

And the relationship continued beyond the formal programme.

When the programme outcome was announced, Danny reached out to check in and encouraged me to follow up with Lucia, look closely at the feedback and remain proud of the work. I remember replying that, considering how much he already had going on, I was humbled that he had continued to make space for me.

His response was simple:

“Always will my friend.”

That probably says more about the relationship than anything else I could write here.

Seeing the work from another angle

Danny knew the work because he was working through it with me. Lucia saw it differently.

She was looking across the programme and its participants, rather than sitting inside the project with me.

Her feedback confirmed some things I already believed were strong in the idea: the passion behind it, the attempt to rethink sustainability, the gap in Caribbean beverage education, the potential of a train-the-trainer approach, and the importance of having a clear first phase rather than trying to build everything at once.

She also raised practical questions around market readiness, marketing and recruitment, and what the roadmap looked like beyond that first phase.  

Could people actually find it? Would they participate? What would make them want to? What would happen after the first experience?

The ginger beer example brought all of that back to something I could see and explain.

It also reinforced something I had been trying to do with Garden to Glass for years: keep the larger idea intact while finding ways for people to enter it.

The part I hoped for: community

When I look back at Raise the Bar now, one of the biggest parts of the experience wasn't actually the curriculum.

It was the relationships.

I had hoped for that. After all, it is a mentorship alliance.

Entrepreneurship can be isolating, especially when the work sits across multiple worlds: agriculture, hospitality, education, culture and sustainability. It can be difficult to find people who understand enough of each world to really bounce an idea around with you.

The introductions, meetups and cohort interactions gave me more of that.  You bring your own work to the table. You explain it. People question it. You listen.  Sometimes the conversation changes the idea. Sometimes it just confirms something you were already thinking. Either way, you are no longer working entirely inside your own head.

That is part of what I value about the word “alliance.”

The work may begin with one person and one idea, but it doesn't have to stay there.

What I actually left with

I wouldn't say Raise the Bar gave me the passion behind CSI. That was already there.

What it gave me was a better process for working with the idea.

I became more comfortable putting the whole vision on the table and allowing someone else to challenge it. I became better at refining without feeling that refinement meant abandoning the original intention.

And I became more aware of the difference between having a big vision and communicating a clear first step.

That is something I expect to keep working on.

Because in my opinion the Caribbean doesn't need another sustainability slogan. It needs practical ways for knowledge to move between growers, producers, educators, bartenders, chefs, communities and consumers.  It needs more of the knowledge that already exists to be documented, shared and valued.

And it needs ways for local knowledge to participate in a global conversation without stripping away the context that made that knowledge valuable in the first place.

From garden to glass, cultivating continuity

The Cultivated Spirit Initiative is still developing.

Its purpose has become clearer through the work that followed: building education and outreach that can strengthen capacity across the Garden-to-Glass Value Chain, connecting agricultural production, processing, beverage practice, cultural knowledge and ingredient literacy.

The first expressions of that work may look quite simple.

A drink. An ingredient. A fermentation process. A workshop. A story about where something came from.

But that is how the larger idea becomes something people can actually experience.

So what did I leave Raise the Bar with?

A clearer CSI. A stronger capstone. A better understanding of the questions I still need to answer. A network of people I hope will remain part of the journey.  And a little more confidence in doing something I've been learning to do for years: taking a big idea and bringing it back to something people can experience.

For me, that might be a glass of ginger beer.

It might be a bartender learning where an ingredient came from.

It might be a grower discovering a new pathway into hospitality.

It might be a conversation between people who otherwise would never have found each other.

The point is that Garden to Glass has always been about connection.

Raise the Bar helped me work on that same connection in a different way: taking what was in my head, putting it in front of other people, and seeing what happened.

Ideas need somewhere to grow. They need people to challenge them. They need people to believe in them. 

And eventually, they need a doorway into the world.  Not just bartenders or chefs, but for farmers, enthusiasts, and everyday people who want to connect with ingredients, culture, and community.

I'm still working on what comes next.

But I think I know the path a little better now. From garden to glass, cultivating continuity.