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Jeff
by Jackie DeCarlo
Over the past few months, it has been especially gratifying to read the reflections of my colleagues about the role faith plays in their Fair Trade work. I hope you have felt inspired and informed. As I end my time as lead blogger, and in keeping with the approach of the holiday season, I thought I would offer some considerations about Fair Trade gift-giving in our lives. ~ Jackie DeCarlo
Part of my daily practice is to read from inspirational sources. Currently I am revisiting Simple Abundance, a daybook I received as a gift about a decade ago. A recent reflection included,
“At this time of year our conscious attention often turns to what we don’t have rather than what we do-and for a very good reason. The season of non-stop shopping has arrived. [After Thanksgiving] the race to get ready for the next round of holidays begins. No sooner have we celebrated the season of plenty then, with the advent of the first official days of [holiday] shopping, we enter…frenetic weeks of looking, finding, buying, and ordering-but not for ourselves. We feel overwhelmed by a season of lack….
Before we head to the mall, it would do our souls good to have a reality check, in the form, not only of counting our blessings, but of focusing on them. Money is going to have to buy a lot in the next few weeks, but it can’t buy the gifts that count the most: good health, a loving and supportive [relationship], healthy [children and loved ones], the fulfillment of creative expression, and inner peace. We forget this, not because we’re ungrateful louts, but because we get distracted by the razzamatazz of real life. Now is the time to remember….”
~ Sarah Ban Breathnach
The “razzamatazz” of this year makes me eager for the holidays to fly by so 2010 can get here. The illnesses of elderly relatives, the purchase of a new home and the resulting shift from an urban to suburban lifestyle, a global economic crisis impacting my day job and the Fair Trade movement I love-all are my own special type of 2009 distractions and reasons for dread as I look at my holiday list and check it twice.
Yet this week, I have received cheerful greetings from a friend with the World Food Program who narrowly escaped a kidnapping in Pakistan. Another friend in Sudan has found his humanitarian service includes sleeping in tool sheds and having only a towel to provide warmth in the cool night air.
Definitely this is the time to count my blessings and to recommit myself to a season not just of making it through the shopping process. I’ll start by offering a word of thanks to you the reader. If you are visiting this site, you are probably already doing your best to make plenty of Fair Trade holiday purchases. You are building a just marketplace gift by gift. You’ll probably even offer educational pointers on economic justice to relatives and friends while they unwrap your offerings. You do so because you remember that across the world there are many who don’t have good health, love and companionship, freedom, peace. You are taking small actions in a big, complex world to alter that reality for others. Fair Traders like you make shopping worth a lot of focus. Thank you and happy holy days.
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Jeff
by David Funkhouser
Late in the sixth decade of my life, I said farewell to a wonderful community of friends in Philadelphia, let go of much of the “extra” I had accumulated, packed a few boxes, prepared to ship my piano, and headed west into the world of Fair Trade. Like many other passages, it just seemed like the right thing to do. Following 10 years of parish ministry as an Episcopal priest, including faith-based community organizing work, I was ready for a change. The opportunity to join TransFair USA in Oakland, California would draw on experience and skills developed over the years, and the prospect of taking part in a mission intended to empower small-scale farmers and farm workers struck a major chord. More than five years later, I reflect now on the amazing privilege it is to be part of one of the most promising social change initiatives on the planet: the Fair Trade model that is building dignity, improving people’s lives, and nurturing farming families in very concrete and real ways. I’m grateful also that Fair Trade challenges us in the Global North to look mindfully at our consumption patterns and change how we do business, for the benefit of everyone.
The theme Jackie proposes for this blog is the intersection of our spiritual paths and Fair Trade. I acknowledge that the seeds of my current work and the type of work I have done most of my life were planted during childhood and adolescence. In the beautiful Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and the rural community where I grew up, life revolved around the small United Church of Christ (UCC). The values of simplicity and generosity seemed to be naturally embraced in our somewhat insular life; however, there was also a strong taste of struggle, as hard-working families, including our own, faced economic insecurities and hardship. Something was born in me in my youth that has stayed with me, and it had to do with “what is not right with the world.” That seed motivated me to look beyond the Valley to the wider world, and, with the encouragement of special persons along the way, I set out to become a doctor, with the bold intent to follow in the footsteps of Albert Schweitzer in Africa. I left the Valley and went to a UCC college, but instead of med school and the Africa dream, I joined the Peace Corps and spent two years teaching biology in Bogotá, Colombia. The Peace Corps experience was rich and formative in many ways, and it also brought me face-to-face with harsh realities of endemic poverty and systemic economic injustice, causing a lot of pain and inner conflict. This was taking place in the late tumultuous ’60s as I began to connect the dots for a deeper understanding of what was not right with the world, and I became more and more aware that this was all part of my spiritual path. I accepted that the conflicts, injustice, and contradictions made it impossible to be neutral.
Seminary (rather than med school) followed the Peace Corps, then ordination and Episcopal parish ministry, school chaplaincy, and a period of broadening my spiritual practice by conversing with Quakerism, Judaism, Buddhism. In 1978, I learned about the revolution taking place in Nicaragua and the role of Christian base communities in that process, and for the next 10-12 years I lived and breathed Central America, working on education for U.S. Americans on what was happening there, accompanying delegations, building relationships, and, overall, trying to influence U.S. policy. The policy piece was incredibly frustrating and difficult. There were many rewards, though, in the relationships with Central Americans, both in their countries and exiled, and many of them were part of faith communities. Those were perhaps the most challenging and also the most rewarding years of my life, nurtured by the vision and conviction of people who faithfully pursued their dream of justice and dignity. Their faith reinforced my own.
Fast forward to many years later, when I woke up to Fair Trade and to the insight: THIS WORKS! This is an accessible and concrete way to address social and economic justice, and the work is consistent with values I’ve held all my life. Of course, the greatest inspiration and meaning comes in relationship with remarkable people who are part of the Fair Trade movement-the producers, artisans, and workers and their families, as well as the partners all along the chain. I am reminded that meaning is at the core of spirituality.
I’m a great admirer of those who have contributed to this blog before me, grateful for their gifts, their inspired work, the questions they raise. The issues of over-consumption and the future of our planet are at the root of the spiritual crisis that afflicts our species. In this path in Fair Trade, also in the evolution of my spiritual journey, my aspiration is to contribute to real and accessible solutions to the great problems of our time, solutions that empower people to become actors in their own lives, as necessary for us who are privileged as for the unfairly treated. Trying to do this, I’ve become more and more aware of the need to hold contradictions as we attempt change. It’s a tough thing to do. I like to remind myself of a quote a close friend shared with me, written in the 20th century by the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov: “Freedom consists in the force and power not to admit evil into the world.” I think of the spiritual path as trying to raise my consciousness in the search for that kind of freedom, and the Fair Trade path as putting my consciousness into action.
- David Funkhouser
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Jeff
This week I am pleased to share the reflections of Melanie Hardison, who coordinates Just Living http://www.pcusa.org/justliving/ and Enough for Everyone http://www.pcusa.org/enough/ as part of the Presbyterian Hunger Program in the Presbyterian Church (USA). I am fortunate to work with Melanie, particularly as we endeavor to be part of the faith contingent of the Fair Trade Futures conference in September 2010. I also have a bit of pride at her contributions to Fair Trade as she and I both attended Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, which has deep ties to the Presbyterian Church. No matter what your denomiation (or lack thereof) both Melanie and I will be curious to read your response to her blog’s final question.” ~ Jackie DeCarlo
by Melanie Hardison
How does faith inform my work with Fair Trade? One of my early formative moments happened when I was 11 years old, in confirmation class. I went through confirmation with my father, who wanted to become Presbyterian and had asked if he could go through confirmation and join the church with me. (For those of you unfamiliar with Presbyterianism, this is - to say the least - unusual. I’m still grateful that both the pastor and I said yes.)
The formative moment came when the pastor led us in an activity in which we wrote the words, “Who Am I?” at the top of a sheet of paper. Before writing our answers, we were instructed to write these words next: “I am a Child of God.” I remember the pastor encouraging us to express who we understood ourselves to be, but saying first: “No matter what else you are, always remember first and foremost that you are a Child of God.” I was aware, too, that my dad had written “I am a Child of God” at the top of his page, and indeed each person the class had written “I am a Child of God” at the top of their page. It was part of the lesson: We are all God’s precious children.
As I grew older and began to learn about injustice and suffering in the world, I began to wrestle deeply with how it came to be that I was born into a life more privileged than most people in the world. I was born with white skin, in the United States, in a wealth-class family, with two stable parents that were able to provide for my basic needs, and more. I enjoyed health insurance, was able to go to college, and more. If I had all these things and was able to get around fairly easily in the world, why can’t everyone? Aren’t we all God’s children?
As a young adult I also came to develop my identity as a theologian and activist, thanks in part to the Youth Theology Institute at Candler School of Theology, an incredible minister Rev. Clover Beal, and my coursework with the Religious Studies Department at Agnes Scott College. It seems that my whole life, from confirmation class to my current work in the Presbyterian Church (USA), I have been exploring the social and public implications of individual faith and how it can be applied in the church and world.
Fair Trade is a significant part of the professional work I feel called to do. As a Presbyterian I believe that God does not wish suffering or poverty or violence on some people and not others; rather it is human-made structures that are imperfect and unjust, not God’s structures. There is enough for everyone - enough love, abundance, creativity and joy - that there must be a way we can each live to our most full and true potential. Those of us who are able to work for the survival of others (because we don’t have to focus on survival for ourselves) have a responsibility to do so.
For the 1,300,000,000+ people in the world who live with hunger, and the 2,000,000,000+ people who live on less than $2.00 per day - all of whom (like me, my dad and the other kids in my confirmation class) are God’s precious children - Fair Trade is a viable economic alternative that helps people gain access to needed resources, provide for their families, help gain control over their lives and live with increased dignity. It’s a system I have experienced at the ground level in a number of cooperatives in a number of countries, and I believe in it fully.
These are the things that have undergirded my work in Fair Trade and related initiatives for the last 11 years. What shapes and inspires yours?
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Jeff
 (Photo credit: LWR)
For the Christian tradition it is time to start planning for an important holiday….no, not Christmas, but Palm Sunday! Guest blogger Kattie Somerfeld, of Lutheran World Relief, explains why fair and sustainable trade are important to her religion’s practice. She also gives readers an opportunity to bring eco-palms to their congregations by planning for purchases now. ~ Jackie DeCarlo
by Kattie Somerfeld
For Lutherans and other people of faith, Fair Trade is about more than fair income, sustainable development, and protection of the environment. It’s about seeing God in the faces of our sisters and brothers in the products we buy. For us, it’s about affirming their dignity with our consumer dollar.
On Palm Sunday, Christians remember Jesus’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem on a donkey, where people threw palms on his path and shouted “Hosanna in the highest!”
We wave palms fervently as the procession comes down the aisle, shouting “Hosanna in the highest!” anticipating the pivotal moment that defines the Christian faith - Christ died, Christ rose from the dead.
To us, those green palm fronds represent a new hope for an ailing world. To most producers of palm, however, they represent something an unjust system of trade that keeps them trapped in a cycle of poverty.
That’s because palm cutters (called xaterros (sha-TARE-rows)) typically trek deep into the forest to extract palm that they bring back to sell to middlemen, who go on to sell it all over the world. Although palm purchases total about $4.5 million a year, the xaterros see very little of this money.
Middlemen pay for palm by volume, prompting xaterros to extract as much palm as possible from the forests, often to the detriment of the palm trees. In trying to earn a living for themselves, they are forced to systematically destroy their main source of income.
Lutheran World Relief and other faith groups support the sale of Eco-Palms, a more just and environmentally friendly palm product. Eco-Palms encourage a better system by paying xaterros by the quality, not the quantity, of their fronds. Instead of selling their palms to middlemen, groups of palm harvesters process, package, store and ship their own palm, creating jobs and keeping more of the money made from sales in their own communities.
Purchasing Eco-Palms directly helps these communities, who benefit both from the higher price of their palms as well as the extra five cents per palm that is invested back into the communities. This social premium builds schools, provides health insurance to xaterros and their families, and improves palm storage facilities.
As we prepare for Palm Sunday, we reflect on the wonder of Jesus’s death and resurrection as well as the life he lived on earth. He walked with the poor, the ostracized, and the disadvantaged. In his teachings he emphasized again and again our mandate to love one another as God loves us. Including Eco-Palms as a part of your congregation’s Palm Sunday activities honors this mandate by ensuring that everyone can share in the sense of joy, celebration and hope that the coming of Christ brings for all of God’s people.
For more information visit lwr.org/palms. If you are interested in purchasing Eco-Palms for Palm Sunday 2010, send your name, congregation, email, and phone number to ecopalms@umn.edu - we will contact you by January 6, 2010 with final prices to confirm your order.
Kattie Somerfeld is the Fair Trade Projects Coordinator at Lutheran World Relief. lwr.org/fairtrade or fairtrade@lwr.org
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Jeff
by Serena Sato
Photo courtesy of SERRV
My journey to a world defined by the ways of fair trade began with my first trip to an economically impoverished nation - the Dominican Republic. As a young teen on a “mission trip” to a sugar cane batay in the countryside, I was devastated to learn how the sugar cane workers lived. My connection to them was through sugar - the plentiful treats I enjoyed back home thanks to the cheap sugar on the shelves at our neighborhood Kroger, and their extreme poverty thanks to the same.
The people we worked and worshiped with were, in actuality, slaves to the economic system. They were Haitians who crossed the border in hopes of earning a living. Their meager earnings ensured that they could not leave their village, and their pay in ‘corporate dollars’ that were only usable at the company-owned store dug them deeper into poverty.
I also learned that the people I spent time with were full of life and love. They could express joy through song and dance that sent me spinning. The children that I played with tried to teach me some Spanish and brought me food from home that I struggled to swallow with a smile. They laughed and joked while teaching me how to share and to more broadly understand the concept of loving my neighbor.
I have worked in the field of fair trade for more than a dozen years - both with People Tree in Japan and with SERRV (http://www.serrv.org). My faith as a member of the Community of Christ builds on my desire to promote a fairer world right here, right now. We believe in God’s ongoing guidance and in the call to develop right relationships through community and care for our neighbors - all of the children of God.
Last weekend I sat in our central worship temple (a place dedicated to the pursuit of peace) during the annual Peace Colloquy. I listened as a speaker from Darfur shared a painful update on the situation in Sudan. I attended workshops on sustainability as part of Christian Feminism, and learned more about the absurd discrepancy of wages by gender here in the US. While I sat in silence, I thought about ways that fair trade relationships build peace. I remembered countless stories of how the opportunity to be treated more fairly helped improve relationships within families and communities, kept families together, led to investments that benefit whole communities, and gave women the strength to speak up. I thought about my own connections with artisans, farmers and their advocates around the world. Connections with those farmers in the Dominican Republic, with artisans I’ve worked with in rural Bangladesh, with weavers I’ve met in Ecuador. Connections with many other faiths I am able to interact with through my work at SERRV. And I thought about how right it is in my world and my faith that I can chose the way of fair trade.
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Jeff
By Jackie DeCarlo
Photo: I’m celebrating Fair Trade with members of the Kuapa Kokoo association. Photo credit: Lutheran World Relief
Through this blog, I have been able to invite several friends and colleagues to reflect on their spiritual paths and how those intersect with Fair Trade. In the coming weeks we’ll be hearing from folks like Serena Sato, who works at SERRV and participates in a small Christian community in Madison, WI, and David Funkhouser of TransFair USA who is also an ordained Episcopalian minister. It seems right for me to add my own personal experience. I’m sharing a slightly modified part of a talk I gave to a Unitarian community when I worked for FTRN a few years back. It tells part of my story and shares my motivation as a Fair Trader.
….There is an official definition of Fair Trade that speaks of it as a partnership based on dialogue, transparency and respect. For me at the level of the soul, Fair Trade has the power to improve lives both spiritually and materially. “Buying Fair Trade is like giving a glass of clean water to a thirsty person,” a cocoa farmer told me once. Her Fair Trade association– Kuapa Kokoo — had sold at that time enough cocoa at fair prices in Ghana to dig 96 water wells, open three schools, and provide her village’s first “places of convenience,” what you and I call “bathrooms.” When we buy Fair Trade, we help make those kinds of developments possible. And we get high quality, beautiful or tasty products in own hands, our own homes.
This is a great irony for me as a person: Basically my job as a consumer educator is to convince people to shop. First off, I hate shopping. Second of all, I am a Quaker. Not the folks on the oatmeal boxes, Quakers have a tradition of simplicity. We are supposed to look for the God within everyone, not what shoes somebody has on her feet or what brand of coffee is in his cup. We aren’t supposed to be concerned with things of this world. Yet these kinds of distinctions for me have been such an important part of my spiritual journey.
In Quakerism we use “queries”, which is just an old fashioned word for “questions,” to investigate our motivations, to clarify our intentions, to promote reflection. I like the queries related to “Personal Way of Life” from the Baltimore Yearly Meeting:
- Do you live in accordance with your spiritual convictions?
- Do you seek employment consistent with your beliefs and in service to society?
- Are you watchful that your possessions do not rule you? “
The questions for me become: Am I promoting materialism? Am I suggesting that you need to buy more, just in a politically correct way? Am I contributing to the kind of over-consumption that led to the recent global economic recession? Here’s how I answer those queries for myself.
About a decade ago I was traveling around Central America and Mexico. I had gone through some tough times and was getting some space from the US trying to figure out what I believed in, what mattered. I was “taking a year off.” But in a complication I hadn’t expect, in these very materially poor countries I kept coming into contact with people who wanted to be part of popular American culture. Everywhere I looked: American magazines, fast food, Tommy Hilfiger, and television.
I have been in some remote places in the world, but wherever there is electricity, there is a television. Consider the implication of this. All over the world, way up high on mountain tops and down in flat rice fields, people are seeing not only our sometimes simple-minded sitcoms and reality-shows, but they are also watching our commercials. They are learning our materialism, our over-consumption. And, because billions of people live on less than $2 a day, many of them want our lifestyle.
This frightened me. Because I became worried, not only that the planet can’t sustain our kind of consumption spreading, but because millions of people are buying into a system that disconnects them from their individuality, separates them from their mother earth, and seeks to direct their energy and their skills into purchasing power. The cloud of despair was getting darker for me.
At just about the same time I encountered a Fair Trade coffee cooperative in the highlands of Chiapas Mexico. I ended up spending four months volunteering for the cooperative. This was in 2000, when coffee was about .80 cents a pound on the world market, below the cost of production and much below the then guaranteed Fair Trade price of $1.26. I learned about how the fair price for coffee worked to help people out of poverty. Beyond price, I also learned about Fair Trade as self-sufficiency, dignity, and opportunity.
I also learned that picking coffee beans is some of the hardest work you’ll ever do. I didn’t have a total conversion and end up living in Mexico. I eventually left and was on a bus traveling for hours and hours headed back to my middle-class lifestyle. Somewhere along the way I had an epiphany: Fair Trade helps prevent impoverished bodies AND it can help prevent the impoverishment of souls. That is why I dedicated my professional live to helping people of faith and others of goodwill create economic justice through conscious consumption and trading.
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Jeff
by Jackie DeCarlo
In a few days I will be at a Washington, DC institution: Busboys and Poets in the historic U Street neighborhood. I will be representing the Fair Trade White House campaign (http://fairtradewhitehouse.com) at an evening hosted by Global Exchange to celebrate Fair Trade month. It is no surprise the event will be at Busboys. In just a few years the combination bookstore, restaurant, and meeting space has come to be a center of DC peace and justice activism. It is also no coincidence to me that its owner, Andy Shallal, is a man of faith who through his business, art, and volunteer service works to promote interfaith understanding. (http://www.svn.org/index.cfm?pageId=1036)
But in some ways Mr. Shallal is not unique. Throughout the Fair Trade and other justice movements, people of faith make lasting and sometimes unrecognized contributions. I know that in my own faith community, Friends (Quaker) Meeting of Washington, one behind-the-scenes volunteer has, for at least 8 years, made sure that Fair Trade coffee is available for sale and refreshment after weekly worship services. I recently learned of a Catholic woman who makes sure that homemade and fresh snacks are always available to the volunteers of a local Fair Trade coalition that meets at regularly. Her hatchback is never lacking a cooler filled with beverages and munchies. Of course, there is no forgetting Edna Ruth Byler, a Mennonite missionary who, I contend in my book, started the Fair Trade movement out of the trunk of her car.
In honor of Fair Trade month, I wonder readers know of faithful Fair Traders that need a little spotlight. A boost of recognition or a pat on the back. Please use this space to name some names, and let the Fair Trade world know how that person infuses spirit into the Fair Trade movement.
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Jeff
by Jackie DeCarlo
 Photo: FTLA recently held a community discussion at St. Cross Episcopal in Hermosa Beach, CA on how to start a Fair Trade business. Courtesy of Daniel Wilson, FTLA.
“Three Catholics, a Jew, and an Atheist walk into a bar…” no, it is not the start of a joke, but a slightly embellished description of how the grassroots group Fair Trade Los Angeles (http://fairtradela.org/) got started, according to its coordinator, Joan Harper. In addition to her professional role at the Office of Justice and Peace for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles (http://www.archdiocese.la/ministry/justice/peace/index.php),
Joan is a volunteer with the Fair Trade LA group (FTLA), helping it build awareness of and participation in the Fair Trade movement in a vast urban area. Joan was one of those Catholics who in 2005 formed FTLA to work with diverse groups to educate Angelinos about fair trade and to increase purchase of fair trade products and awareness of global poverty and trade issues.
Joan and her family recently hosted me for a week as I made a series of talks and presentations on behalf of Catholic Relief Services (http://crsfairtrade.org) to mark Fair Trade month. Thanks to Joan’s efforts, I met Fair Traders of many faiths-Lutherans, Episcopalians and Presbyterians pop to mind-who affirmed for me how incredibly important people of faith are to building and sustaining a grassroots movement for Fair Trade in the United States.
As Fair Trade is grows and flourishes in mostly secular arenas, people of faith are a grounding force. There are Fair Trade businesses and Fair Trade Towns. Fair Trade is a topic of academic debate and media attention. Throughout concerns and controversies, marketing tactics and branding wars, a stabilizing force in the movement is the presence of people of faith focused on respect for God’s creation, first and foremost.
I love to tell the story of Fair Trade being started by a Mennonite missionary. I rejoiced recently when Islamic Relief USA launched a Fair Trade project with Equal Exchange. http://www.equalexchange.coop/islamicrelief) I am heartened that the volunteers from FTLA join together as a people of many faiths, and none at all, to build community commitments to economic justice. All these efforts at the grassroots foster my hope that even in the secular marketplace, Fair Trade will be shaped by the ethos and the activities of people who seek to serve a purpose greater than themselves.
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Jeff
by Peter Buck
This week’s guest blogger is Peter Buck of Equal Exchange. EE is a worker-owned co-operative of fully committed fair traders, founded in 1986. They purchase, process and sell coffee, tea, chocolate, nuts, berries and bananas from forty small farmer co-operatives in twenty countries. Read on to learn how one of the pillars of success is Equal’s unique relationship to communities of faith.
Adrienne Fitch-Frankel pointed out in a post to this blog that, ” . . . communities of faith are among our society’s most important champions of social justice”. This is certainly true in Equal Exchange’s experience with investors, partners and customers:
- In the late 1980s, several congregations of Catholic women, including Dominican Sisters and Sisters of St Joseph, were among our early, critical investors.
- In 1997, we recognized the importance of our faith relationships when we started a “Coffee Project” partnership with Lutheran World Relief, to jointly market coffee and other Fair Trade products to Lutheran congregations.
- In thirteen years, the Interfaith Program has expanded to twelve such partnerships, including with Catholic Relief Services, the United Methodist Committee on Relief, Islamic Relief and other national, faith-based relief and development organizations.
- Our relationships also include many allies like Heartbeats and the Inter-Religious Task Force on Central America in Cleveland and the Jubilee Justice Task Force of the United Church of Christ.
With the help of partners, allies and hundreds of local activists, the Interfaith Program sells over one million pounds of products from small farmer co-operatives to ten thousand communities of faith. This represents about a quarter of Equal Exchange’s sales.
As a Catholic, and a Worker/Owner and Interfaith Program Representative, I am constantly grateful for the opportunity to put my faith into action. I also find that action strengthens my faith.
I spend a lot of my time-visiting churches and schools and attending conferences-with people who are faithful, engaged and inspiring, and who are willing to put a lot of effort and creativity into “moving coffee (or chocolate, or tea) for the farmers”. Our Interfaith Partners put in long hours organizing marketing and education to promote Equal Exchange; parishioners bring coffee to their churches for fellowship after services, and organize regular sales; activists promote Fair Trade in the regional conferences of their denominations; clergy spread the word to other clergy; campus ministers and their inspired students bring us to their campuses.
Over the last ten years, Equal Exchange has led about 300 people of faith on delegations to visit farmer co-ops. I have led four delegations, to El Salvador and Mexico. Delegations can involve some physical discomfort, and emotional challenge in confronting the realities of poverty, injustice and struggle. It is inspiring to see a delegate facing these challenges-maybe for the first time-struggling to make sense of their experience and think about how to bring it back home. It is even more inspiring to participate when the delegates help each other process our experiences, in the light of our faith.
This community of farmers, activists, investors, Interfaith partners, customers and Equal Exchange worker/owners is the Interfaith Program.
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Jeff
by Adrienne Fitch-Frankel
The Jewish high holidays referenced in Adrienne’s post last week have ended, and we finish up her contributions to this spirituality blog with a few more thoughts about the connection to economic justice of religious rituals and holy days. I’ll be curious to know if readers have particular religious rituals that evoke their devotion to justice…..
As I mentioned, one of my favorite Global Exchange resources is Passover Seder insert, which is written in the lyrical language of the Passover Haggadah and draws a parallel between the Biblical story of slavery in Egypt and the slavery faced by the children who are forced to grow our cocoa.
Here is an excerpt from the Passover Seder insert that draws those connections:
Assembled: We can walk in Moses’ footsteps. We can have the courage to ask the Pharaohs of today to let the children go.
Leader: We feel our lives are busy. That we do not have the time. But where would we be if Moses did not take the time to lead us to freedom?
Assembled: Where will those children be next year, if we do not take a little time to help these children find freedom?
Our faith traditions and sacred books explain, in a way that resonates especially deeply, why we should engage in social justice advocacy. These texts and stories are rich with social justice messages that have passed the values of each of our faith communities from generation to generation for thousands of years. Many members of faith communities grow up integrating these values into the core of our being, and they manifest themselves in daily acts as simple as looking for a Fair Trade label or as broad as developing a strategy to persuade an entire community or nation to go Fair Trade. These values catalyze not only our own personal involvement, but means that millions like us share our social justice values and are likely to get involved if only they had the information and programs available to them.
The “how” is equally important. Effective social justice organizing and outreach is structured through communicating to groups of people. Congregations are some of the only large groups that have survived the fracturing of our society away from interdependent communities. This means that communities of faith are among our society’s most important champions of social justice, not only because of values, but also because of the communities they have held together more successfully than other institutions.
Regardless of which faith tradition you come from, I would like to invite each and every one of you to participate in a tradition I just followed at the Jewish New Year. Each of us is challenged to reflect on how we can be our best selves, and set some goals for the coming year on how we would like to change. After you finish reading this article, please take just five minutes to set a new goal for something new you will commit to do to promote Fair Trade. Make a plan, with the steps you will take to reach that goal and a timeline.”
Return to Adrienne’s posting from last week if you need specific action ideas, and please do use this blog to share the religious rituals or traditions that inspire you to act for economic justice.–Jackie
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