Contact: David Kennedy david_kennedy2000@yahoo.com

April 25, 2003

On the chocolate front, I have introduced friends and family to fair trade chocolate, bought it for Christmas presents and whatnot, and talked about the campaign at the event last Saturday. We also persuaded a couple of local stores to start selling fair trade chocolate. My mom works at a library here in Scottsdale that will be selling coffee in the near future. I am trying to persuade her to serve Fair Trade coffee.

I organized the Global Exchange Tri-National Speaking Tour for the Phoenix area. We had our event this past Saturday. It was a great success! We had about 50 people show up, lots of good questions from attendees, and of course, a great presentation by the speakers. I translated for the Mexican speaker but ran into trouble with a lot of the technical/agricultural terms and had help from a friend. I hosted Jamie Dunn and Jose Lopez, the Canadian and Mexican speakers, at my apartment for the weekend, showed them around Phoenix, and drove them to their next event in Flagstaff. I had a great time conversing in Spanish with Jose the whole weekend. The Global Exchange video, Trade Secrets, is really an awesome video. I will definitely have to order it. With the wealth of information the speakers provided, the video, and the many Global Exchange information sheets, we definitely connected with the audience and got the word out. Many people stayed afterwards, and we discussed actions and mobilizations needed. I promoted Fair Trade and the importance of supporting local and small farmers, here and abroad. I let everyone know about the coffee and chocolate campaigns of GX and the Fair Trade movement in general. It is so important that we mobilize to stop this juggernaut, the FTAA, from being implemented. Organizing the tour here was a good first step, and I am so glad that Global Exchange is doing this.

Overall, it was a great experience for me, and I look forward to doing it again. I am really proud of what we've accomplished, especially considering I had a difficult time enlisting others to help, and I did much of the work and organizing myself. I am still doing the DK Informer-I send it out to several hundred people in 6 different countries. Just in case you missed it, here is a link to an article that mentions Global Exchange. DK Informer article