DIY: Your Parish Can Make Fair Trade a Priority

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 ironic because handcrafted and handharvested food is central to Fair Trade! Nevertheless, I am slowly catching on, and one way I have been introduced to the range of DIY activities is through CRS Fair Trade Ambassador, Linda Coughlin in Miami, Florida. Through her Cards for a Cause effort, Linda is able to “indulge my passion for creating beauty by making hand-made greeting cards and other paper crafts” with a portion of the profits going to charity.

When she’s not being an artist, Linda is a DIY dynamo at her church too. Here are some of her reflections on how she succeeded in helping Our Lady of the Holy Rosary parish make Fair Trade a priority. With Linda’s helpful hints you might just be able to DIY at your parish too!

” Making Fair Trade a Priority at My Parish”
In today’s world economy, where profits rule and small-scale producers are sometimes left out of the bargaining process, farmers, craft producers, and other workers are often left without resources or hope for their future. Fair Trade helps exploited producers escape from this cycle and gives them a way to maintain their traditional lifestyles with dignity. But for Fair Trade to work, consumers have to purchase the products. That’s where we Catholics come in. Fair Trade provides an opportunity for us to trade on our Catholic values.

Our Lady of the Holy Rosary parish, in Cutler Bay, Florida, has developed a strong model for offering Fair Trade products for sale to parishioners. What started as a small Christmas project four years ago has grown into a full-time ministry selling Fair Trade products such as coffee, tea, chocolate, soup mixes, jams, nuts and many other consumable products on a monthly basis. Drop by the parish during the first weekend of each month and you will find ministry members manning the Fair Trade sales table after every Mass.

Our parishioners have really embraced the Fair Trade concept. We have a fairly small parish, but our Fair Trade table is mobbed after every Mass. Everyone has their own favorite, whether it is the coffee, the 10 bean organic soup mix, the hazelnut milk chocolate or the dark chocolate bars. We give out samples of Fair Trade coffee and every month and our total monthly sales average around $700.
The project grew out of an idea to provide a sales outlet for Fair Trade products as well as to promote a non-materialistic alternative to purchasing Christmas gifts at the mall. The ministry ordered a variety of Fair Trade products and packaged them into attractive gift baskets wrapped in cellophane and topped off with Christmas ribbon. It was definitely a leap of faith because the food products could not be returned. We struggled to sell 25 baskets. I was calling everyone I knew and encouraging them to purchase a Fair Trade gift basket to give as a Christmas gift. We managed to sell the 25 and the following year, we decided to go for 50. They sold quite rapidly the second year. In fact, we sold out the first week of sales. The third year, we sold 75 baskets and realized that the Fair Trade products were becoming very popular among our parishioners. So we requested approval to hold monthly sales one weekend per month. That’s when our sales really took off. We donate our 20% profit to the St. Vincent de Paul Society and have been averaging about $100 a month in donations. This past Christmas we sold 125 Fair Trade gift baskets and were able to donate $1,000 to St. Vincent de Paul from the Christmas sales alone.

This past year the ministry decided to try adding some Fair Trade handicrafts to the line of food products they offer. We supported one of the school groups to sell the Work of Human Hands products at the annual Arts and Crafts festival last fall. There was about $600 of unsold handicrafts left over which were offered to the parishioners at the next Fair Trade sale. The items were snatched up quickly and I am thinking of adding a few handicrafts to our monthly sales on an on-going basis. I like to have new and different products to offer to keep things fresh and interesting!

This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 and is filed under Chocolate, Coffee, Events, Fair Trade, crafts . You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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