Since October is officially Fair Trade month, I asked a well-known leader in the movement, Jackie DeCarlo, to do a guest post for us. Jackie is the Senior Fair Trade Officer for Catholic Relief Services (CRS), author of Fair Trade: A Beginner’s Guide, and a fellow blogger. Here you go:
Setting aside that October is Fair Trade month, autumn can be an awkward season for me. The holidays are approaching, and as a Fair Trader my job is to get people in the gift-buying mode, even though I hate shopping! Also, when it comes to sports, I am a bit out of the loop. I prefer solitary jogging (less than 10 days until I finish the Marine Corps Marathon!) to team sports, but this is the season of Monday Night Football and qualifying for baseball’s World Series! Thank goodness Fair Trade Sports has come into my life: I can keep up my end of conversations at the office water cooler and send a message too!
For more than a decade, Catholic Relief Services has been committed to promoting Fair Trade through our crafts, coffee, and chocolate projects. As the official international humanitarian agency of the U.S. Catholic community, CRS naturally finds Fair Trade as a way to put faith into practice in the marketplace. In fact, many of the core principles of Catholic Social Teaching, such as “working for the common good,” reflect Fair Trade practices such as organizing farmer cooperatives. With our program in more than 1,000 parishes and schools around the country, many of my colleagues are beginning to ask “What’s Next?” for promoting economic justice.
Enter the props of Fair Trade Sports! Whether I am holding up a rugby ball to demonstrate the process of harvesting cocoa pods in Ghana or dribbling a basketball in a large high school assembly, sports equipment helps me get attention! Once I make my general Fair Trade point, I take a moment to tell the story of the company behind the RESPECT logo. Students and adults alike are excited to know that Fair Trade is more than sipping the right cup of java or wearing the latest fashionable handcraft.
The Fair Trade leaders at Cabrini College in Pennsylvania took the notion on by organizing campus-wide awareness raising events that incorporated Fair Trade Sports equipment into a Wallyball tournament (here again, I didn’t even know what Wallyball WAS but the students got a whole tournament going!). CRS Fair Trade Ambassador Ann Green taught her son about Fair Trade and now his whole Ultimate Frisbee team is using it on the Texas A&M campus.
Those are one-off examples, though, and what is missing is an institutional commitment from faith-based organizations to purchase Fair Trade equipment for their youth groups or sports teams. Just as dining halls have converted to Fair Trade coffee, I can envision athletic departments expanding the values of good sportsmanship to encompass purchasing practices. That’s why CRS is proud to be exploring with the good folks at Fair Trade Sports how we can guide young people to the field of Fair Trade play.
Next month a dozen CRS sponsored students will be attending the United Students for Fair Trade convergence where Scott James will be doing a workshop. We fully expect those students to return to their campuses fired up and full of ideas for deepening Fair Trade campus commitments. If your school—faith based or secular—has succeeded at doing that, please share your ideas on this blog or give me a holler. As we’ve established, when it comes to sports, I could use all the help I can get. But with all these ideas generating, I am sure that faith-based groups will soon be ready to play ball!
~ Jackie
