Start Date: 3/30/2021 5:30 PM EDT
End Date: 3/30/2021 6:30 PM EDT
Venue Name: Zoom
Organization Name:
WJA NY Metro
Contact:
WJA NY Metro | Responsible Jewelry Practice: Colored Gemstones, with Cristina M. Villegas
Do you buy colored gemstones? Design with them? Wear them in jewelry or just plain love them? Have you ever wondered how they get from mine to market? Or about the people who mine them, some of whom are women? Cristina Villegas, a leading expert on sourcing colored gemstones, will walk us through this complex and fascinating topic! Bring your questions, big and small! Not sure where to begin responsible jewelry practices? This is the place!
About Cristina M. Villegas
Cristina M. Villegas specializes in rural development strategies and is a global leader on the topic of ethical sourcing of gold and colored gemstones. She leads field collaborations with GIA to bring gemstone education and enhanced market skills to rural gemstone miners across Africa. In 2019, she co-founded the Moyo Gems program, which focuses on women gemstone miners and has exported more than 3,000 fully traced gemstones to date, even during COVID19. The Moyo Gems program was profiled in a major feature in British Vogue in 2020. In 2021, she’ll expand her work to more women miners in Tanzania, Zambia, and Ghana to focus on economic resilience and strengthening mining associations’ leadership. She is regularly consulted as an ASM expert on gold, gemstones, diamonds, and ‘conflict minerals’ (3Ts) by the US Government, diverse UN agencies, global companies, and journalists for the Economist, Reuters, The Washington Post, among others. She lectures on extractives for Columbia University’s Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and Executive Courses. From Northern California, she is a longtime resident of Washington, DC.
