Fair Trade Sports | sustainable eco soccer balls and more

I have long admired The RugMark Foundation, an organization fighting child labor in the carpet-making industry. Nearly 300,000 children in South Asia are put to work weaving rugs for homes in the Western hemisphere everyday. RugMark, just like Fair Trade Sports, is turning the terrible practice of forced child labor on its ear by exposing it to the general population through education and helping those who are exploited by these industries by exercising ethical Fair Trade practices.

Certified RugMark rugs, like certified Fair Trade sports balls, are not made by children and every RugMark rug or carpet has a patch sewn into it that assures you that it was not made by child labor. Not only is RugMark creating jobs for adults in South Asia that desperately need them, they also have schools in the region where former child laborers can go to learn valuable trades.

RugMark’s Most Beautiful Rug Campaign and Faces of Freedom (a traveling photo exhibit) both bolster the worldwide effort to end child labor practices. The Most Beautiful Rug Campaign is RugMark’s core campaign against child labor and exploitation. Its stated goal is to end child labor in the South Asian carpet-making industry within the next ten years, and they’ve already made a difference: since 1995, the number of child laborers in the industry has fallen from 1 million to around 300,000.

Faces of Freedom is part of The Most Beautiful Rug Campaign and serves to bring awareness through a series of photographs by U. Roberto Romano. Romano’s photographs travel the world and tell a story of triumph over adversity, displaying the atrocious working conditions that laborers are forced to work in on one hand and on the other, the difference that RugMark has made on the industry. Attendees can see how RugMark runs their business and how they take care of their workers, as well as how they educate the children of the region, rather than exploit them.

Whether you are talking about stitching soccer balls or stitching carpets, children have no place being forced to work in the industry. A person’s childhood is their most precious time. It should be a time of happiness and freedom, not time spent virtually chained to a job that they recive little to no compensation for, toiling away. Children need to be allowed to be children and attend school. Here’s to RugMark and their success to date…well done!