Fair Earth will be exhibiting at the Evanston Ethnic Arts Festival this weekend!

12 Noon to 7pm
Dawes Park, Sheridan Rd at Church
Free admission

First of all, thanks to those of you who joined Chicago Fair Trade at the Daley Plaza for our World Fair Trade Day Celebration!

I also wanted to share a campaign that Green America is launching to celebrate World Fair Trade Day - Fair Trade Your SuperMarket.

Check it out! They provide some really great practical guidelines about how to get fair trade products into your local supermarket. It’s frustrating to not be able to find fair trade products in the places you normally shop to get your groceries. Instead of making choices which compromise your ideals, why not take some action to fair trade your supermarket?

From Green America, below is a sampling of resources found on the Fair Trade Your Supermarket Campaign website:

Action steps – Steps to you can take to convince a store to go Fair Trade.
Postcards – Downloadable messages that you can mail to supermarket headquarters, or drop in comment boxes
What to say – Talking points for sharing the story of Fair Trade with store managers
In-store messaging – Downloadable shelf-cards to place where a Fair Trade product should be in a store (or drawing other shoppers’ attention to the Fair Trade products that are there)
Picture uploading – Send us an image of yourself at the supermarket, and we’ll ad you to our slideshow of Fair Trade shoppers across the country who are working to make Fair Trade more available everywhere.
Twitter – Include #FairTradeYourSupermarket in your tweets to let your friends and fellow campaigners know what you’ve done to Fair Trade Your Supermarket.

Happy World Fair Trade Day!!

Fair Earth will be exhibiting at Columbia College’s EcoFair. Come say hi!

For more information visit Columbia College Recycling.

THIS WEEKEND - March 27-28, 2010 - Come join us!

Paper Craft is a group of incredible entrepreneur women who make delightful hand-made paper from natural and recycled materials. They work with banana fiber, elephant grass, pineapple tops, and recycled paper. Fair Earth has been working with them for the past couple years, and we are excited to bring you some of their new products again this year!

Since last year, their workshop has expanded. In addition to making paper products, they are also making glass beads from recycled glass bottles and window panes. The glass is crushed to a fine powder, poured into a hand-made ceramic mold, and then fired in a wood-fueled kiln. The resulting beads are delightful!

Clay molds used for making recycled glass beads

Every time I speak with Harriet, the workshop manager, I am impressed with her vision, drive, and high attention to detail and quality. Not only are Paper Crafts’ products beautiful and meticulously created, they are also made by women who 100% OWN AND RUN their entire production center. The entire enterprise is owned by the women whose talented hands bring the paper to life, and then work to market it. I find this model to be inspiring and empowering. Many business models that I have seen and worked with have a stark distinction between the producers and the managers, ultimately limiting the skills development of the artisan members. Paper Craft’s model empowers all of their women to develop their skills not only in producing hand-made paper, but also in business management, client relations, marketing, etc. I am inspired by their work, and LOVE their products!

Thanks for your support!

Sincerely,

Holly Elzinga

Four women from the Paper Craft team!

Vats of paper pulp and dyes, and paper drying on screens in the sun

©2010 Fair Earth | Andersonville Galleria - 5247 N. Clark St. Chicago IL 60640

Meet Margaret – one of our beaders

The first time I met Margaret, her captivating smile and confident personality captured me. I was later drawn in even more by the quality and creativity of her work, as she intricately bent wires and wove beads to create the lively forms of butterflies, elephants, frogs, lizards, scorpions, giraffes, birds, and many other animals and critters. We started working together last year, when she had only been beading for a year’s time. She learned to make beaded critters from a friend, and with a brave entrepreneurial spirit invested in supplies. Her determination to succeed has rewarded her. She currently employs four other people and has established a dignified business that supports herself and pays the school fees for her two children, Evelyn and Mary.

We visited Margaret’s workshop today, which is located in the front room of her home in Dagoretti where she lives with her two girls. A small table was set up with stools around it, where she and three of her workers sat beading. Two women were stringing beads onto wire with amazing precision and skill, while another wove the beaded wire around a previously constructed wire frame to create the finished masterpiece.

When I asked Margaret what I should tell her customers in America, she said, “Please tell them thank-you for buying my work so that I can send my children to school.”

So, on Margaret’s behalf, THANK-YOU!

Margaret’s work is currently available at our retail location at the Andersonville Galleria – all of the beaded critters and beaded animals you see there are made in her workshop!

Sincerely,

Holly Elzinga
www.ourfairearth.com

Below is important news from Chicago Fair Trade.

On Monday January 11, with your help, we can move Chicago a major step closer to supporting fair wages and working practices for developing communities abroad.

Chicago Fair Trade is a non-profit organization that works to grow the Fair Trade movement in the metro area by increasing consumer demand and access to Fair Trade products. With our membership organizations and individuals, we contribute to sustaining communities around the world, enabling them to invest in their villages and businesses, protect their environment, and ultimately lift themselves out of poverty.

RESPECT

Fair Trade Soccer Balls?

“Really? But I thought fair trade was mostly about coffee?”

This is a question I have been asked numerous times over the past several years.

NO, fair trade is NOT only about coffee!

As coffee was among the first fair trade certified products to be introduced to the US consumer market, it remains a highly-recognizable and popular fair trade item. HOWEVER, ANY product can be ethically produced under fair trade standards. The fair trade movement is vast and growing as more people are becoming conscious about the ethics behind the production of their products.

Last week I gave a fair trade soccer ball to Valentino, a delightful boy who I support in Uganda through the FOCUS Mulago Child Project. FOCUS works with children in the Mulago and Katanga slum communities of Kampala by helping with school feels and supplementing their formal educational with training in social and emotional development, skills and vocational training, and entrepreneurial skills.

As Valentino held his fair trade soccer ball with a gleaming smile on his face, I couldn’t help but focus on the word “RESPECT” printed in large letters on the front of the ball.

Respect for each other, respect for Uganda, respect for the workers in Pakistan who made Valentino’s soccer ball. I told him that this was a very good soccer ball because it was fair trade – which means that the people who worked to make his ball were paid a good and fair wage, so they were also very happy.

Coming from a slum community in Kampala, Valentino knew exactly what I was talking about. Daily he sees people working back-breaking hours only to bring home a few shillings which hardly put dinner on the table. He also sees the vast disparity between the rich and the poor in Kampala, and the exploitation that has developed between business owners in their comfortable offices and the manual laborers who struggle to keep their children fed. He also sees his mother trek daily to the market to buy her supply of sugar cane, tomatoes, and charcoal, and he helps her set up shop near their one-room home where they sell their goods for a small mark-up to neighbors. He has seen his mother out of desperation at the end of the day sell her goods for a lower price than what she paid for them, so that she has at least a few shillings to feed her children. He knows all-too-well the price of sweat, the cost of work, the hunger after failing to find enough customers, the reward of job well done, and also the satisfaction of dinner on the table after a profitable day’s work.

I watched Valentino’s already-wide smile grow even bigger as he realized his soccer ball was also making another family happy. He had received a gift that he will enjoy, and they were enjoying the satisfaction of a good business day, and the profits of a job well done.

In one brief moment, there was a direct connection between Valentino, a young boy in Kampala, and the people who made his soccer ball in Pakistan.

This is one of the things that fair trade does for consumers – it puts us in direct contact with the PEOPLE who make the products we enjoy. It reconnects us with the human side of our food, our clothes, our jewelry, our sports equipment. It makes us consider the work and skills that went into the product’s production, it brings us to a new level of appreciation for craftsmanship and talent, and it plants a seed of RESPECT inside of us – a seed that continues to grow as we continue to become more connected to the people behind our products.

As you go through your day today, I challenge you to be conscious about the producers behind the things you consume, touch, wear, and enjoy. Who picked the coffee beans that were brewed into your morning cup? Who designed and sewed the clothes and accessories you choose to wear? Who made the computer at your desk, what trees did the paper you use come from, who processed the raw material into paper?

Whose life are you respecting (or disrespecting) by the choices you make today?

I add “disrespect” because in all honestly, as many of us know, a large number of products on the market DO indeed come from a production line that disrespects their workers. Walking through a supermarket or department store, customers are often quite disconnected from the people behind the products they are browsing. We remain ignorant about whether they were made with child and sweatshop labor, unfair wages, and worker exploitation or by people paid fair wages and treated with RESPECT. We make the decision to support the wrong group because we are uninformed.

But in a society of knowledge, awareness, information, and global connections, we no longer can afford to make ill-informed decisions.

In a world where we have the CHOICE to purchase either from retail lines whose producers are unknown or exploitative, or to purchase from lines that put us in direct contact with producers and their stories – why would we WANT to remain ill-informed?

Fair Trade products are increasingly becoming available. If you are Chicago-based, see Chicago Fair Trade for a listing of Chicago-based fair trade businesses. If fair trade products aren’t as available as you’d like, there’s a lot you can do to change that! A suggestion or a petition can go a long way. Contact your alderman, speak to the buyers for your local coffee shop, make a suggestion to your grocery mart, bring fair trade products to your workplace. See Chicago Fair Trade’s website for more resources about how to increase the availability of fair trade products.

Your choices and your actions make a difference. In this new year, be mindful. Be CONSCIOUS. Make a difference that you can proudly stand behind.

Please join Fair Earth on Saturday, December 12, 2009 for a Christmas Tea hosted by Ginger Creek Community Church

TIME: 8:30 am-2:30 pm

LOCATION: Drury Lane in Oakbrook, IL

Come check out the Seeds of Change Marketplace this Saturday at Berry United Methodist Church.

Browse beautiful products from several socially-conscious and fair trade businesses working to make a difference!

Date: December 5, 2009
Time: 10:00 am - 4:00 pm
Location: Berry United Methodist Church - 4754 N. Leavitt Street, Chicago