Could your town be a Fair Trade Town?
Posted by Sandy on 09 Mar 2010 at 9:27 am | Tagged as: Fair Trade, Social Responsibility
Today, we’re proud to announce our support of TransFair USA’s Fair Trade Towns movement, with a $50,000 grant from Green Mountain Coffee®, and a three-year commitment of $925,000 from the Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Foundation. This past October, during Fair Trade Month, we had the pleasure of working with two Fair Trade Towns. The first is close to our HQ in Burlington, VT, which was declared a Fair Trade Town on October 17. We also worked with the Boston Faith & Justice Network to lend awareness to the campaign in Boston — Boston is on track to become a Fair Trade Town in 2010.
Why Fair Trade Towns? More and more of us care about where our food comes from and how it is grown and processed. We feel a responsibility to better understand the impact that our consumption has on the communities that produce the goods we purchase. So many of us join CSAs, visit our towns’ Farmers Markets, and seek out local foods. Fair Trade provides an opportunity to extend these same concerns and values to foods and other products that are not grown locally – like coffee.
We believe the Fair Trade Town movement can be an important vehicle for educating local communities on the benefits of Fair Trade. It creates a powerful connection between our local and our global communities. And it can also support the growth of vendors in our local communities who purchase ethically-produced goods and services.
We hope that this additional funding will help the Fair Trade Towns movement continue to grow. There are now 13 U.S. municipalities that have been recognized as Fair Trade Towns, and there are 30 additional towns working towards this status. Could your town be a Fair Trade town?
I was so happy to read this! Green Mountain, right now, has been the only Fair Trade coffee on the shelf at my local Shop Rite in NJ. I have challenged my FB friends to go to their local grocers to see “how many” fair trade coffees are available. Thanks for producing and distributing this blend and I hope that you will expand your fair trade offerings so they are the rule and not “the exception.”
A worthy cause for sure, excited to hear about your work on this important effort!
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When are you going to 80 K Cups Nantucket Blend Coffee?
April 28 will be my next coffee order.