When Equal Exchange parties, it parties co-op style. This fair trade company’s celebrating its 20-year anniversary by inviting a buncha people – over 200 — with a stake in fair trade for a celebratory Stakeholder Summit.

I ran in a lil bit late today, cuz I just can’t do it in the morning. Actually, I did okay, considering the jetlag and such — Jordan woke me up at the crack of dawn – 7:15 am – and in a mad whirl I got ready and into Sue of Red Tomato’s car to head over to the summit at Bridgewater State College, Mass.

And I walked in to join a really intense group of 200+ people – farmer-producers, coffee companies, nonprofit orgs — and random people like me, labeled as “ally.”

Rob, one of the co-directors of Equal Exchange, kicked things off with a really short slide presentation about Equal Exchange. The lil company got started back when it introduced its Café Nica, partly in response to the 1985 embargo imposed by Reagan against Nicaragua.

Now, that lil company has annual sales of over $20 million. Wow.

So – Why the summit? Said Rob: “The purpose of today’s summit is to explore together how we can lead the fair trade movement…. If we don’t do this, others sure will, and those are others who don’t have the passion and the commitment to justice that those of us in this room have.”

“We wanted to give weight to the values we hold dear, that’re part of the IFAT definition of fair trade that’re often ignored or overlooked because they’re too difficult to do or too difficult to measure.”

Word.

More about the proceedings to come –

Update: Deets from the first workshop.

Tags: fairtrade

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