Welcome to episode 2 of our latest series of the Rainbow Turtle Rebooted Podcast. I have a real treat for you today where I meet Frank Braun of CaWeLa, the importer and supplier of fair trade goods in northern Bavaria, Germany. Well, that's how I viewed him when I met him earlier this year during my visit to Fürth. Following my recent interview I've completely changed how I view him.

During the Bosnian war, in the early 90s, he drove with a friend from Germany to the refugee camps in Hungary and Bosnia taking food and clothing to the people there. Later on he set up a charity to employ social workers to help women traumatised by the war.

He was part of Siemens' fast track programme for high potentials. He went to the US as part of their leadership team to start a new company in California. On his return he set up a change agent programme to look at cultural change.

He went to Peru with his wife, who was offered a teaching post there, and started mapping organic and sustainable businesses. Coming back home, he organised one of Germany's first transition towns in his local area.

Now he runs CaWeLa in his spare time whilst he provides business consultancy to struggling small organisations and is involved in the transition town movement in Germany. Throughout the interview he offers sage advice and I could've recorded a separate podcast with all his soundbites alone!

So, strap yourself in because we're about to embark on an exciting ride.

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Following my trip to Fürth in Germany back in February this year, I interviewed Yana Laber, the managing director of the Welt Haus or Centre for Fair Trade. The Welt Haus hosts the fair trade shop, the fair trade fashion store, the education centre as well as offices and meeting spaces for local community groups.

Yana also heads up their education programme that they teach to young people and adult groups. Yana is a keen organic gardener and has taken food, grown at the back of the Welt Haus, into schools to teach them how to grown and cook it.

I hope that you're inspired by Yana's enthusiasm for fair trade and sustainability as I was when I first me her.

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The Rainbow Turtle Rebooted Podcast is back, just in time for Fair Trade Fortnight 2026. This is a short taster to give you an idea of what this new series is about.

I have gone back to Fürth in northern Bavaria, Germany, to interview some of the interesting people I met who were involved in fair trade.

Episode 1 is with Yana Leber of the Welt Haus in Fürth. The Welt Haus houses the fair trade shop, Welt Laden, the fair trade clothing company, Farcap, and some local community groups. Yana is also heads up their fair trade education in schools and with adult groups.

In episode 2, I interview Frank Braun of CaWeLa, a local importer and distributer of fair trade products. He also has some really interesting stories of supplying clothing and food to refugee camps during the Bosnian war, of working for Siemens in the US and setting up Germany's first transition town.

For episode 3, I meet Andreas Schneider, the director of the Welt Laden, or fair trade shop in Fürth. He originally studied theology before moving into fair trade in Nuremberg and Fürth. As well as writing and speaking about fair trade he is a self professed expert in tea, coffee, chocolate and wines. A useful person to know!

I'm trying to line up a few more interviews that I hope to bring out for fair trade fortnight which starts on Monday 21st September...

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Back in September of last year, I met Philipp Abel, who is the head of sustainability at Fürth City Council in Germany. He revealed to me that Fürth was twinned with our town Paisley in Scotland and wanted to establish fair trade links between our two towns. Embarrassingly, I didn't know that we were twinned with Fürth but I was delighted that he wanted to create links with us.

The town twinning movement has been going on for at least 50 years. It is such a good idea to create connections between different towns in different countries rather than building walls. It struck me that adding the layer of fair trade to that relationship enhanced it because it meant we were looking outwards to different parts of the world and creating more links.

Since then Philipp and I have met a few times on line and talked about how we can work together through education exchanges and sharing ideas between our fair trade businesses. He also invited me to join in with their 10th anniversary celebrations of Fürth becoming a fair trade city in February 2026.

Philipp talks about his own family story of creating connections between different countries and the work that Fürth have done to promote fair trade in their city.

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This is a heads up of a special podcast episode that we'll be putting out on the 9th February.

I've been recently talking to Philipp Abel, the head of sustainability at Fürth City Council in northern Bavaria, in Germany, about their commitment to fair trade. I met Philipp back in September 2025 at a fair trade towns conference in Edinburgh and discovered that Fürth was twinned with our town Paisley, in Scotland.

We quickly realised that we had a lot in common, particularly with fair trade, and decided to use our twinning links to support each other in the work that we do. One thing that interested me was to hear more about Fürth's and Philipp's stories and to put them out on our podcast in time for Fürth's 10th anniversary as a fair trade city at the beginning of February.

So look out for our next episode of Rainbow Turtle Rebooted, coming out on Monday the 9th of February, about the work that is going on in Fürth, in particular their commitment to purchasing fair trade products as part of their public procurement policy.

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Welcome to episode 4 of our series and this time we're with Emma Hillcoat of Greencity Wholefoods in Glasgow. Emma has got to be the most positive person I've met and when you combine that with a job that matches her personality and ethics, you have the perfect combination. Emma is also a relatively new recruit to Green City and views the workers' cooperative from a fresh perspective. What's also heartening is that Green City is the kind of organisation that attracts young people who are passionate about the environment and trading fairly with producers and farmers in the global south.

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In this edition I interview Howard Msukwa, a rice farmer from Malawi. He is a member of the Kaporo Smallholder Farmer Association in his local area and has been its chair in the past. He has also served as director of The National Smallholder Farmers Association of Malawi and served as its vice chair. Last year at Scottish Fair Trade's conference I was asked by True Origin to put some prepared questions to Howard about food behaviours and how it affected well being in his country. I'm grateful to True Origin in allowing me to use the recording for our podcast.

Howard has been over to Scotland on a number of occasions and is very good at networking and creating links between the two countries. On a previous occasion he met a farmer from Dumfriesshire who agreed to supply his cooperative with tools so that Howard could set up a workshop to train young people in maintenance. On this visit he met an organic farmer from Fife who was talking about sustainability. They were able to share ideas on how to improve farming techniques, though Howard did joke that our concept of a small farmer is much bigger than theirs.

This episode also brings back the dulcet tones of Josh Brown, the original creator of the Rainbow Turtle podcast. He set up and edited this interview with Howard and took over asking the questions when I had to leave the room for another commitment. If you would like to hear more from Josh, head over to our first series and look up episode 5.

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Welcome to episode 2 of our 4th season of Rainbow Turtle Rebooted. In this interview we meet Scott Irwin of Green City Wholefoods in Glasgow. As we mentioned in our last episode, Green City is a workers' cooperative where everyone has an equal vote and receives equal pay. Scott has worked across the organisation for about 29 years and has many interesting stories about what the organisation has achieved over the years.

Scott himself has had a varied career. He is a former monk from the Holy Island, just off the Isle of Arran on the west coast of Scotland. He also helped set up the Glasgow Fair Trade Cooperative. He is passionate about lifting people out of food poverty and has been involved in a number of schemes to influence government policy and change how big business operates.

Before we start, I'd like to give out a shout to the city of Frankfurt Am Main in Germany. I'd been checking our podcast statistics recently and was surprised to find out that our biggest listening figures came from Frankfurt and not Paisley or Glasgow, as I'd expected. So my thanks to you and I'd love to hear from you to find out how you came across our podcast and what it is that makes you our biggest listeners. I enclose my email address, colum@rainbowturtle.org.uk, if you'd like to get in touch. In fact, if anyone else would like to email me, please do so. I'd be interested to hear what you like or dislike about the podcast. Maybe you'd like to appear in one of our episodes?

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