Bring fair trade and alternative shopping home for the holidays
Delicious
Digg
Facebook
Technorati
An effort to explore your consumer options through the alternative commerce world of fair trade networks often allows you to build the kind of connections between producer and consumer the anonymous world of free trade actively discourages. It used to be a sometimes arcane and frustrating exercise finding fair trade products in a shop or online, but these days the fair trade option is becoming more and more viable.
TransFair describes fair trade as a progressively growing international movement. Each year, the group says, more fair trade certified commodities, produce, and manufactured goods are becoming available to American consumers. A certified fair trade label allows you the consumer to be confident that the creator or grower of the product or commodity you are purchasing has been properly compensated for their labor. Farmers and craftspeople use the additional income earned to provide education and healthcare for their children and to improve communities. Buying from fair trade outlets also usually means you will have the opportunity to learn about the people behind the products as you shop.
Your first stop might be your local church or synagogue to see if they're planning to hold a fair trade sale day or better yet run their own fair trade shop year round. (If not, why not?) But you can find an increasing number of fair trade outlets online. The list below is by no means comprehensive, nor does a listing here indicate any sort of endorsement from Claretian Publications and U.S. Catholic. Do a little homework yourself and decide whom you're comfortable giving your dollars to, then shop well, not often. Good luck!
Ethical shopping resources on the Internet
Catholic Relief Services fair trade shop
Fair Trade Federation's online catalog list
Fair Trade Federation's retail store list
Where to buy fair trade products
Commodities (Coffee)
Cafe Mam
Find out more about Fair Trade
Ethical Consumer magazine (from England)
Resources for charitable giving:
Bread for the World: Celebrating more than 25 years of seeking justice for the world's hungry people, Bread for the World is a Christian voice for ending hunger in the new century.
Catholic Charities USA is the nation's largest, private network of people helping people. The 1,400 local agencies and institutions provide social services across the country to more than 10 million people in need each year-regardless of religious, ethnic, racial, or social background. Catholic Charities USA aims to reduce poverty, support families, and empower communities in the United States.
The Catholic Campaign for Human Development spends just 13 percent of its resources on administrative and fundraising costs.
Catholic Relief Services spends a paltry 7 percent of its donation dollars on administrative and fundraising costs.
Here's a list of top-rated charities from the American Institute of Philanthropy.
The Better Business Bureau's Wise Giving Alliance at Give.org
Give.org is the web site for The BBB Wise Giving Alliance. Give.org collects and distributes information on hundreds of nonprofit organizations that solicit nationally or have national or international program services. It routinely asks such organizations for information about their programs, governance, fund raising practices, and finances when the charities have been the subject of inquiries.
The BBB Wise Giving Alliance never recommends one charity over another, and selects charities for evaluation based on the volume of donor inquiries about individual organizations. These policies allow the Alliance to serve donors' information needs and also help donors to make their own decisions regarding charitable giving. The volume of public inquiries helps identify which national charities will be the subject of a BBB Wise Giving Alliance Report.
Charity Watch
The American Institute of Philanthropy (AIP) is a nationally prominent charity watchdog service whose purpose is to help donors make informed giving decisions. Its Charity Watch website provides visitors with information about AIP, the charities it rates, and its method of grading charities. Special features will focus on Top Salaries, Top-Rated Groups, and hot topics in charitable giving
Other features include Tips for Giving Wisely, a helpful-hints guide for getting the most for the dollars you donate; answers to frequently asked questions (FAQ); praise from the press; useful and interesting articles on a variety of topics relating to charitable giving.
GuideStar
GuideStar's mission is to revolutionize philanthropy and nonprofit practice with information.
The National Association of State Charity Officials
NASCO maintains a contact list of all state agencies that have oversight of charitable solicitations.
The National Catholic Community Foundation
NCCF is structured to facilitate engaged philanthropy through continual involvement of individuals, families, communities and organizations.
NCCF was created to address the needs of persons and organizations who wish to engage in philanthropic activities which support the ministries of the Catholic Church, but do not have the ability to organize a traditional private foundation.
Network for Good
Network for Good is the first coalition of its kind to help nonprofit organizations become more effective and efficient. Network for Good will help them further their mission by integrating the full power of the online medium into their own operations such as fundraising, recruitment and advocacy.
At the GreaterGood.com and iGive shopping portals, Internet users can shop at leading online merchants-including Amazon.com, Priceline, Nordstrom, Land's End, Dell, Office Max, 1-800 flowers, and more-and up to 15 percent of each purchase automatically goes to an organization you select at no extra cost. Shoppers can support local and national charities, the nation's K-12 schools, and college and university scholarship funds.
Heifer Project International directly combats poverty by giving livestock and trees, along with training for their upkeep, to families throughout the world. This year, you can give the gift of geese ($20 per flock), sheep ($140 for a whole one or $10 per share), heifer ($500 whole or $50 per share) and much more to those on your list who already have it all. You'll also be helping to combat hunger, support women's businesses, and care for the environment with each donation.
More on Fair Trade from Salt of the Earth
Catholic Relief Services launches new fair trade chocolate initiative
They're as familiar as the start of another school year: parochial school children waving bars of chocolate at passers-by or going door-to-door in one kind or another fundraising effort for their schools, clubs, or basketball teams. Most people are happy to buy the fundraising candy bars to help out, but what gets least attention in many of these small exchanges is the ethical center of the transaction.
Who grew the cocoa beans that were used to produce this fundraising premium? How well were those producers compensated? While retailers and manufacturers often can make a great deal of profit from finished product sales, growers and producers of raw commodities often get paid very little, subsistence or even below subsistence wages, for their crops. It's fair to wonder how fair the cocoa market has been to the growers and their communities and families.
Catholic Relief Services has been working on a sweet deal for consumers and producers. In a broadening of its existing efforts to promote fair trade alternatives to free market consumerism, CRS in September launched its Fair Trade Chocolate Program.
The CRS Fair Trade Chocolate Program will promote Divine Fair Trade Chocolate, the world's first farmer-owned Fair Trade chocolate brand. CRS expects that the program will create a welcome opportunity for Catholics in the United States to act in economic solidarity with the farmers in Ghana whose cocoa is used in Divine chocolate.
"It's important to CRS to create opportunities for Catholic consumers to live out their faith with the choices they make every day as consumers," said Michael Sheridan, director of the CRS Fair Trade Chocolate Program. "We often hear from people who want to help but don't know what they can do. This program is an easy way for us to make a stand with people overseas who are all too often left on the sidelines of the global economy."
"Under the free market system," said Kwabena Ohemeng-Tinyase, Managing Director of the Kuapa Kokoo cooperative in Ghana that grows the cocoa used in Divine chocolate bars, "the price that was paid to the farmers was a peanut. But then come fair trade with a fixed minimum price and a top-off premium to support the farmers in their various localities." Because of fair trade premium prices, he said, farmers have been able to improve living conditions or create programs in education, health, and sanitation that had never existed before in their communities.
Divine brand Fair Trade chocolate is produced by the Day Chocolate Company, the world's first farmer-owned Fair Trade chocolate company. The farmers who grow the cocoa in Divine chocolate are not only paid Fair Trade premiums for their beans, but they also own a third of the company that sells Divine chocolate. These Ghanaian cocoa farmers sit on the Day Chocolate Company's Board of Directors, share in its profits, and participate in decisions about how the company is managed.
"Divine chocolate is 100 percent Fair Trade, which is wonderful. But what makes the Divine model so exciting from an economic justice perspective is the fact that the farmers themselves own part of the company," Sheridan said. "CRS is proud to promote Divine chocolate, and salutes this dual commitment to Fair Trade and farmer-ownership."
Participants in the CRS Fair Trade Chocolate Program can purchase Divine Fair Trade chocolate for their own consumption, give it as a gift, sell it as an ethical fundraiser, and encourage local store managers to serve it wherever chocolate is sold.
CRS enters new Fair Trade partnership
Imagine working all year to plant, harvest and process coffee, then earning just a few cents from each cup of that coffee sold in the United States. Most people would say that's not fair. Fair Trade coffee guarantees disadvantaged coffee farmers a fair price for their product. And now Catholics and other socially conscious coffee-lovers in the Spokane metropolitan area have the opportunity to purchase Fair Trade coffee through a partnership announced today between Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and Nectar of Life, a 100-percent Fair Trade company based near Spokane.
As part of the new partnership, CRS and Nectar of Life are encouraging Catholics in the region to serve Fair Trade coffee in their homes, parishes, schools and offices; to sell it as a fundraiser; and to give it as a gift. "Catholics in eastern Washington have participated actively in the CRS Fair Trade Program for years," said Michael Sheridan, Senior Advisor for Economic Justice at Catholic Relief Services. "Now, with Nectar of Life's addition to our network of partners, they can continue to support Fair Trade while also being a socially responsible company in their community."
As a CRS partner, Nectar of Life contributes a percentage of all sales it makes through the program to the CRS Fair Trade Fund to support the agency's work on behalf of disadvantaged artisans and farmers around the world. In addition, Nectar of Life will continue to contribute $1 to the Fair Trade Fund from the sale of each bag of its "Nectar Ice" coffee - a roast specially formulated for brewing iced coffee. For more details about the partnership, please visit http://www.crsfairtrade.org/ and http://www.nectaroflife.com/.