November 2002
Hello from Boston College! BC now serves only Fair Trade Coffee in all of its 6 dining facilities, and Fair Trade Coffee is consistently and always available as one of several choices at our campus Starbucks. So, all in all, we're done. Our next move is a talk at Lasell College on the campaign for some interested students and administrators, in addition to some students headed to Latin America over breaks.
September 29, 2002
Brewing Victory : Students push BC to offer more 'Fair Trade' joe, but the flow is low at BU, Harvard
9/29/02 By Noah Isackson, Globe Correspondent The Boston Globe
Jonathan Evans and Tim Wientzen have already eaten lunch, but they stop by their Boston College dining hall anyway. Lines are forming around the salad bar, the stir fry chef is taking orders, and students are piling chips, soda, ice cream, french fries, and other decadent combinations on their trays.
Evans and Wientzen, both juniors at BC, walk past the crowded tables and checkout lines and stand next to the coffee machine. On one silver canister is a sticker about the size of a postage stamp. Tiny type - the slogan ''Fair Trade Certified'' - frames a figurine holding two bowls of equal size. Evans taps it with his finger.
''It's an insignificant thing in terms of its size,'' said Evans, 20. ''But it's a big deal. It means change for the better.''
The simple gray-and-white label is the modest face of an international movement to bypass a global market that, activists say, oppresses millions of coffee farmers. The idea is simple, too: a fair price for the often underpaid smaller growers. Evans and Wientzen, friends since freshman orientation, are sharing a recent triumph: the successful push at BC to sell Fair Trade coffee at all campus outlets this fall.
The passion of the nationwide campus movement, backed by Boston-based Oxfam America, has recalled more well-known forms of college activism in recent decades. ''It reminds me of the grape boycotts back in the '70s,'' said Pat Bando, director of dining services at Boston College.
Others say students are pushing for Fair Trade coffee in the same way that they have lobbied for vegetarian foods, recyclable plates, and the elimination of Styrofoam cups. The movement foundered at Boston University, where officials said students complained about the taste, which is robust but some people found overly strong and acidic. Harvard has had a mixed experience.
At BC, Fair Trade coffee is now served in every dining hall - where 250 gallons of joe are guzzled every week.
''Coffee is a part of most college kids' lives,'' said Wientzen, 21. ''When you tell people there's a coffee that can help millions of people, they listen.''
Mount Holyoke College serves Fair Trade in all 15 of its dining areas, and last year that South Hadley activism amounted to about 16,320 pots, or 163,200 cups, of politically active brew.
Still, economics also has a hand in college activism. Contracts between coffee suppliers and food services vary, and some schools just can't get Fair Trade at a feasible price.
At Harvard, for example, university officials calculated that a full-time menu of Fair Trade coffee would cost 60 percent more than other premium brands, or an extra $1,000 a week, said Alexandra McNitt, director for marketing and communications for Harvard's dining services.
At Boston University, where an estimated 1.2 million medium-sized cups of coffee are served every year, dining service officials found that student interest in Fair Trade doesn't always equal full-fledged coffee activism. After all, people still have to drink the stuff.
Two years ago, a Fair Trade campaign brought the coffee to four of the university's seven food shops, locales that serve students as well as the public. Within the first few weeks, the shop's employees heard plenty of complaints.
''Customers didn't like it,'' said Steve Canario, BU's director of operations for dining services. ''It was: `Where's the old stuff? You changed the coffee, why?' People noticed. That's not to say you can't provide a quality Fair Trade coffee, but people were just asking to have the old blend back.'' As a compromise, Harvard now serves Fair Trade coffee twice a week in its undergraduate dining halls and rotates Fair Trade blends through its other food service operations. If interest in Fair Trade coffee surges, Harvard could revisit the issue and add additional days, McNitt said.
BU returned to its old house blend and, to accommodate Fair Trade supporters, stocked bags of Fair Trade beans at the same stores.
One year later, a BU student group again asked for Fair Trade coffee, but the result was much the same. In December 2001, dining service officials responded by offering free cups of Fair Trade during finals week. Fair Trade fliers describing the campaign were also handed out to students.
''We re-tested the waters once again,'' Canario said. ''The response was minimal. We didn't get any feedback either way. So we continue to offer [Fair Trade] by the pound. It sells, but it's not a big mover.''
Still, Oxfam officials say that Fair Trade movements are brewing on at least 100 college campuses. No one has formally tallied the amount of Fair Trade coffee in the nation's college dining halls, but demand is ''noticeable,'' says Cam Schauf, president of the National Association of College and University Food Services, and director of auxiliary services at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.
''It's definitely one of the hot issues,'' said Schauf.
Hot enough, Schauf adds, that Bryn Mawr was serving Fair Trade coffee at two dining halls before its students even inquired about it. The school now offers the coffee at all five of its eating operations.
''Some colleges like to get ahead of the curve,'' Schauf said. ''So that when they become issues on campus, we're ready to talk to our student customer.''
Evans and Wientzen came upon a similar situation at BC, where dining hall administrators began offering Fair Trade coffee at two shops in the spring of 2000, after a few vendors brought the concept to the university's attention, Bando said.
''We were interested because we are a Jesuit Catholic university,'' Bando said. ''By nature, we are very conscious of social issues and we try to do what's right.''
Wientzen first heard about Fair Trade coffee in 2000 after meeting an Oxfam representative at a Ralph Nader rally at the FleetCenter. He put a pamphlet in a drawer and didn't think about it until bumping into the same activist at a Harvard campus get-together months later.
In fall 2001 Evans and Wientzen, building on the fact that BC already served Fair Trade in two of its dining halls, embarked on a grass-roots campaign to make Fair Trade coffee available in every spot where coffee is served.
''Tim and John are a bit different than the average college student,'' said Evan Cuthbert, a campus minister who advised them and wrote a letter from campus ministry urging BC's dining services to serve Fair Trade full time.
''I don't think people looking at them or speaking to them would understand them to be radical in any way,'' Cuthbert added. ''In fact, they are rather unassuming. But they are very passionate and very direct. They don't pull any punches.''
Evans and Wientzen devised a plan to win the support of as many student organizations as they could, holding ''teach-ins.'' By late spring, 17 student groups backed Fair Trade, said the two, who got 30 of their BC friends to wear T-shirts each Friday that read, ''I Support Fair Trade Coffee At Boston College.''
''They took it upon themselves to enlighten the entire university,'' said BC's Bando. ''Menus at schools are all about supply and demand, and they helped create demand. We can't go ahead with something that affects everyone until we know people are behind it.''
First, dining services sponsored taste tests last spring that convinced the university that students cared as much for social issues as they do for good-tasting caffeine.
''Some customers, especially young people, drink more milk and cream than they do coffee,'' Bando said. ''When they tasted Fair Trade without cream, it was a real eye-opener, pardon the pun. But we learned that students wanted a high quality of coffee but also wanted to know that they were helping people.''
BC had originally planned to introduce Fair Trade in all of its dining areas by spring 2003, Bando said, but fast-tracked the service so it would be available this fall.
Now, Evans's and Wientzen's campaign mostly involves making sure that coffee urns have the Fair Trade emblem, and coffee pots are filled with Fair Trade brew. They are more relieved than satisfied, they say, because their campaign was not an ''us versus them'' sort of struggle between students and the university.
''A coffee cup becoming a weapon for social justice - that's an empowering feeling for everybody,'' said Evans, who, by the way, doesn't even like coffee.
''Maybe after dessert,'' he says. ''But I mostly like the challenge of trying to stay awake.''
June 12, 2002
We have it! Next year Boston College is looking into the eyes of a brighter tomorrow. Following a vigorous campaign, BC Dining Services finally felt the pinch of the campaign and succeeded to offering Fair Trade in ALL dining halls. They were gracious enough to host a campus wide coffee "cupping" to allow us to choose the brand by taste. We do not know as of yet what brand was chosen but we will know soon.
The main component of our campaign was gathering letters of support from student and administrative organizations. We amassed 18 letters, all of which were signed by that organization. At the same time we educated the campus by making presentations/teach-ins to those organizations. Several of these teach-ins were covered by our school's newspaper, which helped spread the word. Also, we supplemented the press support by submitting articles/editorials to both newspapers.
During mid-April we sent out copies of all 18 letters, all 5 news articles and a Senate resolution to over 30 administrators including the president of the school and all of his advisors. BC Dining Services were quick to respond to the letters with a counter-letter which heralded themselves as champions of the fair trade movement, something we did not necessarily agree with. However, their exaggerated attitude caused them to promise Fair Trade for next year as they had been planning on it all along. The campus wide "cupping" soon followed.
In the year to come we look forward to keeping the pressure on BCDS and possibly continuing the education leg of the campaign.
May 2002
We have FTC in all of our dining halls for next academic year and our educational campaign was very successful. We'll see what we decide to do next year. Now I have to spend the summer figuring out what the best way for me to spend my time will be. Any suggestions? Let me know and hopefully we'll be in touch in the future.
Peace, Tim Wientzen
April 10, 2002
My name is Tim Wientzen and I am a co-coordinator of the Fair Trade campaign at Boston College. Here's our update and info:
The campaign started in September of 2001. Now, just a few months later, half of our campus is using Fair Trade coffee. We have been making a lot of commotion to our Dining Services about our discontent with our secondary coffee vender, Victor Coffee. We were informed at the beginning of February that Dining Services is "evaluating many coffee companies and their programs for consideration of the areas that currently are not serving either Starbucks or Seattle's best." This is good because now we have the opportunity to switch to either a Fair Trade vendor or at the very least a company that offers Fair Trade. If this happens, our campuss will be about 75% Fair Trade. We have little hope of ousting Starbucks, at least right now. We will cross the Starbucks bridge when we get there. Once we get there, I hope to begin on Fair Trade tea, as well.
