Archive for August, 2008

Saludos desde Managua, Nicaragua! I have just finished participating in a workshop with CRS agro-enterprise, management quality, and evaluation staff from our Latin America region. These folks are about to embark on a CRS project designed to improve the livelihoods of more than 7,000 small scale coffee farmers in El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico [...]

Read the entry: Honoring the Labor of Fair Trade Cooperatives →

When I was in Seattle earlier this summer training a group ofCRS Fair Trade Ambassadors, one of the best parts was a talk given by Scott James, founder and CEO of Fair Trade Sports. Scott is known in the Fair Trade world as a entrepreneur of the best sort: super-smart, passionate about justice, full [...]

Read the entry: The Olympics need an authentic dose of respect →

Summer is almost over, but if you still have time to get some reading done, be sure and visit the Fair Trade Institute for an offering of ideas to peruse and use. The Institute, based in Switzerland, has teamed up with the US-based Fair Trade Resource Network to create an on-line collection of Fair [...]

Read the entry: Fair Trade Beach Reading List →

In case you missed this announcement on the CRS response to the Global Food Crisis, I thought I’d post it as food for thought for the Fair Traders out there. All the implications of the Global Food Crisis have yet to be seen. While on the surface it appears that farmers benefit from the higher [...]

Read the entry: Global Food Crisis: Producers Are Consumers Too →

I recently stumbled across the “do it yourself” or DIY movements. Although I have been an arts and craft fan since my childhood days at summer camp, this growing community of people creating small businesses or influential hobbies based on their own talents and skills had somehow passed me by. That’s kind of [...]

Read the entry: DIY: Your Parish Can Make Fair Trade a Priority →

I am what educators call a “visual learner.” Do you have tips for how to brew a Fair Trade cup of coffee? Then please let me look over your barista shoulder, but don’t hand me an instruction manual. Time to improve my Spanish? Then I invite my bilingual friends to a conversation marked by [...]

Read the entry: Butter the Popcorn for some Justice Flicks →