This year Global Exchange Fair Trade purchases helped install a water treatment plant in India to filter 2,000 liters of water each hour. We created a new month of activities for Halloween and Fair Trade month, delivered kid’s Valentines to the Board of the Hershey’s company, made delicious Fair Trade S’mores in the summer and had a significant victory when Hershey’s agreed to go 100% certified by 2020.

The end of the year is always a good time to take stock, express our gratitude and prepare to meet the new year with renewed energy to make Trade Fair! Here are a few of our suggestions for this year.

1. Buy less stuff: Our good friends over at The Story of Stuff (and winner of the Global Exchange 2012 Human Rights Award) encourage us to choose family over frenzy this holiday season and to think carefully about the full life span of the products we consume. Where does your gift come from? Who made it and where will it go when we don’t want it any more? A gift of time and love doesn’t have to clog our landfills and exploit labor to be meaningful.
2. Shop Fair Trade: When you shop Fair Trade you set an example of responsible consumption rooted in the celebration of craftsmanship; the enforcement of workers rights; and the empowerment of artisans and their communities around the world. You get quality, beauty and tradition in one-of- a -kind, hand-made products. From gemstone earrings set in hand-etched sterling silver in Bali, to messenger bags hand-cut from the inter tube of big rig truck tires in El Salvador, and 100% cotton table linens block-printed in India, there are many beautiful and functional gifts. At the origin of each piece, is a story of preserving culture, supporting community and sustaining the planet.
3. Don’t buy SodaStream: One of the most popular gifts this season is the do-it-yourself soda machine made by SodaStream which carbonates water at home. But don’t do it! People who care about human rights should know that the product is made in an illegal Israeli settlement on stolen Palestinian land in violation of international law!
4. Give the Gift of Membership: A great way to give a gift that doesn’t take up space but keeps on growing is to give a Global Exchange membership. When you do that you’re connecting someone you care about with an international movement to build a better world.
5. Be Generous: Times are still hard for many people who are struggling to recover from storms, from the economic downturn and from personal trials. If you can afford it, give as much as you can to those who are making things better and if you don’t have a lot of money, share your smiles, time, songs and encouraging words.

What are your Fair Trade Holiday ideas? Tell us in the comments.

Have a Happy and Fair Trade Holidays!

Happy Thanksgiving week everybody! In this Fair Trade Roundup, we’ve got a slightly new format aimed to provide you with more Fair Trade news and info. Each Fair Trade Roundup is now arranged into three sections:

1. Featured Update
2. Global Exchange Fair Trade Updates
3. Fair Trade News to Peruse
   

We’d love to hear what you think in the Comment section!

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FEATURED UPDATE: Two Ways to Shop Ethically this Holiday Season

There are many ways to shop ethically this holiday season; here are two:

1. Shop from the Fair Trade Federation’s 2012 Fair Trade Holiday Gift Guide.

From the Fair Trade Federation:

FTF is thrilled to bring you a collection of gifts for everyone on your holiday shopping list! All of the gifts in this guide are sold by members of the Fair Trade Federation– businesses and organizations that are fully committed to fair trade and follow the Fair Trade Principles in every one of their business decisions. Shop with confidence, knowing that your purchases make a positive impact on farmers and artisans around the world. Click here to browse the gift guide.

2. Take part in #FairTuesday.

From #FairTuesday founders Global Goods, a New York-based nonprofit, fair trade organization:

Fair Tuesday (hashtag #FairTuesday) is a fair trade initiative created in response to Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The goal of #FairTuesday is to inspire conscious consumerism and show how an everyday purchase can change lives in a whole community. We are featuring fair trade and eco-friendly brands and inviting other businesses to take a step towards sustainability.

You can read more about how to participate in this blog post.

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GLOBAL EXCHANGE FAIR TRADE UPDATES: Give the Gift of Membership AND You’re Invited to Attend Our Fair Trade Store Holiday Parties!

One of Global Exchange’s Gift Membership Packages

Give the Gift of Membership

There are six gifts to choose from, including “Support a Farmer” and “Stand for Human Rights.” You pick the gift and we’ll take care of the rest. We’ll send out the membership card and gift package, plus keep your recipient in the loop about Global Exchange programs and events with our newsletter and e-mail action alerts.

All Global Exchange Gift Membership Packages include:

• One-Year Membership to Global Exchange;
• Special Gift Certificate;
• Fair Trade Gift(s) that represent Global Exchange’s work towards a more just, peaceful, and sustainable world.

Grab yours today, while supplies last.

FREE mugs some will receive at our holiday parties

Global Exchange Fair Trade Store Holiday Parties

Every year our Fair Trade store extended community gets together to celebrate the holidays. We shop, sip, nibble and socialize with each other while celebrating the holiday season. This year all four Fair Trade stores will be celebrating on the same night, so if you live near one of our stores we hope you’ll be able to join us!   

Early attendees will receive a FREE Fair Trade mug hand-painted in Tunisia FULL of steaming Fair Trade hot chocolate! *First 25 people to spend $25 or more

One-Night! 20% OFF Storewide for Global Exchange Members Only (Become a Member Today).

Come enjoy some holiday cheer and find gifts for your loved ones, while creating a more sustainable and just world. You can RSVP on Facebook.

*Please bring your Global Exchange membership card for your discount.

“Shop for a Cause” Nights Support Bay Area Organizations

This year Global Exchange is partnering with FOUR inspiring organizations to host “Shop for a Cause” nights at our Fair Trade stores in the Bay Area. Our goal is simple and speaks to our vision for a better global economic system: give back to our communities while giving back to artisans around the world through Fair Trade.

During these special event evenings, you can shop for your friends and family and 20% of your purchase will go to the featured local Bay Area organization to help support their social justice work.

Find out which organizations we’re partnering with in this post.

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FAIR TRADE NEWS TO PERUSE

• FairtradeInternational: Annual Report Reveals the Strength Behind the Sales
• Herald Online: Hershey Shareholders Allege Company Uses Cocoa Produced Through Unlawful Child Labor in Africa
• Fresh Fruit Portal: Fair trade transition picks up speed in the U.S.
  Raise the Bar Hershey! Breaking News: Hershey commits to certified cocoa
  
• New York Times: A Matchmaker Helps Artisans Find Luxury Jobs
• Crowdsourcing.org: Dr. Bronner’s Launches Crowdfunding Campaign and New Educational Video on Fair Trade Palm Oil
• CSR Europe: Nestlé UK & Ireland double commitment to FAIRTRADE as KitKat 2-fingers is certified
• Fair Trade Resource Network: Canadian Fair Trade Network Opens Membership & Conference Registration
  
• Chicago Fair Trade: African Fair Trade Convention to be Held in Ethiopia
• CRS Fair Trade: Time to Celebrate: Fair Trade Campaigning Together
• ABC News: Deepen the Holidays Through Fair Trade Gifting
• CBSNews: Palestinian farmers turn to organic farming
  
• GOOD: Want to Learn More About Fair Trade? Here’s a Primer
  
• Justmeans: Socially Responsible Food Is On the Rise in the U.S., New Report Says
  
• Fair Trade Colleges & Universities: Fair Trade Campaigns Conference
  
• The Packer: Organics marketing meshes well with Fair Trade-certified programs

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THE FAIR TRADE ROUNDUP AND YOU!
•    Subscribe to our Fair Trade blog to receive new Fair Trade blog posts automatically.
•    News to share? If you’ve got big Fair Trade news to share, email me.
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We hope that you had as much fun as we did eating Fair Trade bananas, hosting movie screenings, baking delicious Fair Trade goodies, recycling Halloween costumes, and giving out Fair Trade chocolates.

We especially liked Equal Exchange’s video about the Potong Cooperative Tea Garden in India. With your help, Equal Exchange was able to donate 10,000 tea bushes to farmers in India.

If you haven’t taken advantage of our Fair Trade Month promotion, sign up now! Join Global Exchange for $35/year and we’ll send you a gorgeous customized Global Exchange tote bag from Handmade Expressions women’s cooperative in India, a No-Nonsense Guide to Democracy, Globalization or International Development and a bag of Equal Exchange chocolates!

Also, celebrate Dia de los Muertos and honor loved ones. Get tips on how to Build Your Own Fair Trade Dia de los Muertos Altar.

Happy Fair Trade Halloween!

P.S. Check out our Halloween staff picture on Facebook. It’s a hoot!

Global Exchange Fair Trade Sales Associate- Part time

Do you or someone you know have retail experience and a passion for Fair Trade? Then check out this position that just opened up…

Washington DC/ Arlington, VA

Job Requirements:

• Excellent customer service skills, friendly and outgoing attitude
• 2 years of retail experience preferred
• Knowledge of book buying and sales
• Solid written and verbal communication skills
• Strong sense of design established through merchandizing
• Highly motivated and creative
• Organized and detail-oriented
• Ability to take initiative on projects; work independently as well as able to work as part of a team
• Flexibility; ability to work in a multi-cultural and diverse environment
• Demonstrated interest in human rights and social justice work
• Basic computer skills, knowledge of Quickbooks and Quickbooks Point of Sale a plus
• Ability to work weekends and commit to extra hours during the Christmas holiday
• Ability to arrive to work on-time and committed to getting daily tasks done

Responsibilities Include:

• Customer service and sales
• Knowledge of store product
• Understanding and commitment to Fair Trade
• Be on time, prepared, committed and engaged in your work
• Store opening and closing procedures
• Able to keep store tidy, clean, and organized
• Maintain a positive, helpful and appropriate attitude towards co-workers and clientele
• Create signage for store displays with direction from manager
• Use of Quickbooks Point of Sale and cash drawer
• Be able to participate in physical labor including lifting boxes, climbing on ladders, and
  moving furniture
• Share responsibility for store maintenance, including cleaning the store,
  the bathroom, and taking out recycling and trash
• Support the Store Manager in any additional tasks or responsibilities

This is a part time position. Must be able to work weekends. Salary negotiable based on experience.

To apply, please send cover letter, a full resume, two references, and one additional page concretely answering the following questions:

1. Please describe your commitment to Fair Trade.
2. Please explain how your job related skills lend themselves to this position. And/or how your life experience and life values can help you fill this position successfully. Please share any retail responsibilities you have had.
3. Briefly highlight any other aspects you would like to mention about your suitability for this position.

**Please email your resume to: ashleyf@globalexchange.org

***Please do not call about this position

Happy Fair Trade Month!  For 31 days we’re setting out fun ideas and activities  (and a contest!) to have you eating Fair Trade bananas, hosting movie screenings, baking delicious Fair Trade goodies, recycling Halloween costumes, and giving out Fair Trade chocolates to trick-or-treaters. For more, visit Fair Trade Your Halloween.

Breaking news! 

Hershey’s has announced its commitment to source 100% certified cocoa by 2020.

This is a huge step for Hershey’s to improve its supply chain accountability and shows that it is responsive to consumer pressure and you helped us get here!

While we welcome today’s announcement, we continue to urge the chocolate giant to go 100 percent Fair Trade with incremental benchmarks.

As suggested in a joint statement from the Raise the Bar, Hershey! coalition, to truly address child labor, Hershey’s needs to make sure it is certifying all of its cocoa Fair Trade — the only certification that adequately addresses the Worst Forms of Child Labor.

Join us in thanking Hershey’s for taking this monumental step forward and urge the company to choose a 100% Fair Trade certification for its chocolate and truly raise the bar.

For more information about Hershey’s path toward certified cocoa, please see our blog post from earlier year when Hershey’s made its first announcement about going with Rainforest Alliance and its Bliss Bars.

Our 31 Days of Fair Trade has begun!

Have you heard? Global Exchange along with our friends at Equal Exchange and Green Halloween have set up 31 days of fun ideas and activities (and a contest!) that will have you eating Fair Trade bananas, hosting movie screenings, baking delicious Fair Trade goodies, recycling Halloween costumes, and giving out Fair Trade chocolates to trick-or-treaters.

So far so good!

So far this month, we’ve had folks getting in the Fair Trade habit and watching a movie about Potong Cooperative Tea Garden in India. (With every viewing, Equal Exchange is donating a tea bush to farmers in India.)

And we’re just getting started…the month has barely begun, so there’s lots of actions still ahead to look forward to. Let’s take action together.

Here’s how to TAKE ACTION:

• Check out the calendar of 31 Days of Fair Trade Action activities so you can take action daily to support Fair Trade
• Visit FairTradeHalloween.org for the whole list of actions
• Follow us on twitter @GXFairTrade or on Facebook where we will deliver your daily action each morning at #fairtrade31.

Looking forward to taking action with you.

Check out our website for the whole list of actions, or follow us @gxfairtrade or on Facebook where we will deliver your daily action each morning at #fairtrade31.

Fair Trade Successes in Rural India: From Cycles of Drought to Cycles of Reuse

There was no water filtration plant in Barmer, Rajasthan when the Austin-based Fair Trade business Handmade Expressions started in 2005, with the goal of improving the economic livelihoods and social standing of artisan communities in rural India. In fact, there was and still is very little water at all there.

Rich art traditions run deep in Rajasthan, unlike the wells, and access to capital for infrastructure and technology improvements is limited. Geographically isolated and characterized by a harsh, arid climate, many people in Rajasthan struggle to make more than $1 a day. But from the start, Manish Gupta, the founder of Handmade Expressions, was interested in doing more than simply getting local people to sell him their products at a better price—for him and the local NGOs he has partnered with, Fair Trade has always been about holistic development.

The traditional block-print fabric bags the artisans in Barmer began to produce for Handmade Expressions quickly became one of their best-selling items. However, hand block-printing requires an immense volume of water to dye and print the fabric. This issue of resource management in the face of environmental and economic adversity is one that many underprivileged communities face—use water to support an income generating project at the expense of other survival needs, or suffer economic hardship?

Instead of leaving this question alone, Handmade Expressions has sought to make it obsolete by paying attention to local practices and needs, and putting the increased income made possible by Fair Trade to task.

This year, in partnership with a local NGO called SETU, the Society for Empowerment & Trade Uplift of Artisans, Handmade Expressions sponsored and helped install a water treatment plant in Barmer that allows for the recapture and reuse of the water used in block-printing and dyeing. The plant, inaugurated August 28^th, has the capacity to filter 2,000 liters of water each hour and each batch of water can be filtered and reused 15 times!

In addition, what is truly rewarding about this news is learning that Global Exchange has been able to have a direct impact on the success of Fair Trade and sustainable development in Rajasthan through our ongoing support of Handmade Expressions. Over the years, we have ordered hundreds of those very same block-print bags to give out to new members as our way of saying thank you. How inspiring then, for us at the Fair Trade stores to see the real changes we are supporting, and for our grassroots supporters to be able to look at the bag they got maybe even years ago, when they first became a member, and know they’ve been a part of such a successful movement for social and economic justice. It takes time and a lot of effort, but the accomplishments prove to us why we want to continue our work around Fair Trade—we all benefit and get to grow together, in solidarity.

TAKE ACTION!

Join Global Exchange for $35/year and we’ll send you a gorgeous customized Global Exchange tote bag from Handmade Expressions women’s cooperative in India, a No-Nonsense Guide to Democracy, Globalization or International Development and a bag of Equal Exchange chocolates!

Check out our website for the whole list of actions, or follow us @gxfairtrade or on Facebook where we will deliver your daily action each morning at #fairtrade31.

Today is Action #22…Build Your Own Fair Trade Day of the Dead Altar!

Dia de los Muertos is a traditional Meso-American holiday dedicated to the ancestors. Rather than mourning death as purely tragedy and loss, Dia de los Muertos honors both death and the cycle of life. The celebration acknowledges that we still have a relationship with our loved ones whom have passed away.

In Mexico, on Dia de los Muertos families and friends gather in local cemeteries to be with their loved ones and construct private altars, which contain everything from photos, favorite foods, and other memorabilia, in hopes that deceased souls will journey back for the Dia de los Muertos celebration.

Stop by your local Bay Area Global Exchange Fair Trade Stores for all you need to build your own Dia de los Muertos altar!

The San Francisco (map) and Berkeley (map) Global Exchange stores are stocked with everything from retablos to sugar skull molds and meringue power to paper marigolds. Be sure to check out our colorful collection of beautiful skeleton statues, hand-made in Mexico; we have Fridas, DJs, soccer players, CEOs, skateboarders, and more!

This year we have a beautiful selection of retablos, boxes or shrines with hand painted doors which open to hold hand carved figures in colorful scenes of daily life in Peru- such as markets, shops, harvests, weddings and other ceremonies.   Our retablos are made by internationally renowned retablos maker Claudio Jimenez Quispe. Originally from a family of retablos makers in Ayacucho, Peru, where he has trained large communities of retablos makers, he now works in Lima.  Come check out the work of one of the finest craftsmen in the world!

In San Francisco, Dia de los Muertos has been celebrated in the Mission district since the early 70s with art, music, performances and a walking procession, which help us contemplate our existence and mortality — a moment to remember deceased friends and family, and our connections beyond our immediate concerns. This years’ celebration will be held on Friday, November 2^nd. Find out more about the procession.

For those in the East Bay, the Fruitvale Dia de los Muertos celebration will be held on Sunday, October 28^th in the Fruitville Village. More information is available on their website.

TAKE ACTION!

Join Global Exchange for $35/year and we’ll send you a gorgeous customized Global Exchange tote bag from Handmade Expressions women’s cooperative in India, a No-Nonsense Guide to Democracy, Globalization or International Development and a bag of Equal Exchange chocolates!

For 31 days we’ll set out fun ideas and activities (and a contest!) that will have you eating Fair Trade bananas, hosting movie screenings, baking delicious Fair Trade goodies, recycling Halloween costumes, and giving out Fair Trade chocolates to trick-or-treaters.

So Oct. 1st, check out our website for the whole list of actions, or follow us @GXFairTrade or on Facebook where we will deliver your daily action each morning at #fairtrade31.

We’re thrilled to announce that Equal Exchange is selling organic milk chocolate minis and organic dark chocolate minis in bulk, so this Halloween you can support cocoa farmers (including children!)  by passing out delicious, socially responsible chocolate to trick-or-treaters. Equal Exchange will be taking orders starting October 1st.

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Also, consider joining me at the second National Fair Trade Campaigns Conference Oct 26-28! Fair Trade enthusiasts from all over the country will come together to share experiences and resources, sharpen leadership skills, and build momentum for Fair Trade. Register for the event.

Looking forward to working with you to Fair Trade your Halloween!

The National S’mores Day of Action on Labor Day wrapped up a summer of s’mores-making and petition-signing for Fair Trade activists across the country who urged Hershey to end child labor and poverty in the cocoa fields. Our goal was 1000 s’mores by Labor Day and we got close!

887 activists across the country made fair trade s’mores and signed petitions.

Photos of fair trade s’mores eaters were posted on Hershey’s Facebook page. Our final s’mores count, a few choice photos of Fair Trade s’mores eaters, and all the petitions will be sent to Hershey with a letter asking them to catch up with their competitors and start the process of going Fair Trade.

Events took place across the country: 82 s’mores eaters signed petitions and posed for photos at the Higher Vision music and “Community Activation and Awareness Gathering” in Sonoma County, California on June 9.

More folks joined in the campaign at three San Francisco Mime Troupe summer shows in the San Francisco Bay Area, making s’mores and signing our petition.

Fair Traders at Penn State, the Brandywine TrailBlazers, sent us a batch of petition signatures gathered at their Fair Trade s’mores event on the Penn State campus on August 16th. Global Exchange’s Fair Trade partners Green America and the International Labor Rights Forum also spread the word among their activists.

Thanks to everyone who made s’mores, got photographed, signed petitions, and told friends and family about this action. We know you enjoyed taking part; the Equal Exchange chocolate we provided for the west coast s’mores was delicious! And so were the vegan marshmallows and organic graham crackers! (Hershey’s s’mores wouldn’t hold a candle!)

We will keep up the pressure on Hershey: stay tuned for our next action, Fair Trade Your Halloween– 31 days of Fair Trade Actions!

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