LISTEN UP! Coffee as a Virtue podcast

To celebrate Fair Trade month, an enlightening and genuine conversation with Stephan von Kolkow and Laurie Britton of Café Virtuoso is featured on The Common Good podcast with host Lee Van Ham!  The co-owners of this organic and fair trade coffee company in San Diego discuss how Fair Trade looks to them as businesspeople with a bottom line to mind.

Stephen and Laurie each give personal accounts of how they started Cafe Virtuoso, how they educate customers on the products, the pros and cons of Fair Trade’s certification and the trends in the industry.

It turns out to be a bit more expensive, yes, but it was hard to turn down since their experience at farmer’s markets taught them that individual customers were asking more and more for Fair Trade product. Seeing the demand, they in turn led the way with their wholesale customers, a victory for Fair Trade as more and more vendors will be moving FT product at an increasing scale that bodes well for FT to be a sustainable model.

Listen to free podcast here: Episode 18: Coffee as a Virtue

The Common Good postcasts, a project of Jubilee Economic Ministries, profile aspects of sustainable economic practices that move us toward a model that is in compliance with Earth’s abundance.

A Fair Trade Bike Ride

Day 29, Bay Area Fair Trade

Back in July, Fair Trade San Diego received word of a biker dedicated to fair trade who was making his way down the coast from Vancouver, British Columbia.  While we weren’t able to meet up with Kieran during his time in San Diego, we wanted to be sure and share his message with all of you.  Below is a message from Kieran.  Keep in mind that this message is over a month old.  He has since traveled over 3,400 miles and is now in Mexico en route to Chile!

What I'm doing is a personal initiative after being involved with Fair Trade Vancouver for the last 18 months I wanted to get some more in-depth knowledge of Fair Trade and how it's helping/affecting the actual producers. I have wanted to take time to travel and enjoy cycling so I put all of that together as inspiration for my trip. I'd love to get sponsorship/backing from interested groups but that's a bonus really.

In Vancouver I can see how the efforts of the group can pay off with increased sales/awareness of FT within the city, but finding out more for myself and hopefully then spreading that knowledge when I'm back is my minimum goal.

So far I've made it all the way from Vancouver [to Southern California], taking about 6 weeks to do 2,000 miles or so. To Santiago I'll probably do another 6.000 miles at least, depending on routes. So far I've had Fair Trade visits to Thanksgiving Coffee in Fort Bragg, FT USA and Alter Eco but it's likely I won't have much now until southern Mexico, but plenty of opportunities after that.

To learn more about Kieran’s ride and to read about what he has learned along the way visit his blog at www.FairTradeBikeRide.org.

Understanding Fair Trade Labels

I have engaged in many conversations about fair trade over the years and on more than one occasion questions about fair trade certification has come up. Since the topic of certification is such a large and involved topic I won’t spend time here trying to answer all of the questions that I have heard.  However, I would like to refer you to the Fair Trade Resource Network, which has several webinars on its website targeting the ins and outs of the Fair Trade Certifying process.

In this blog entry I would like to present the labels that consumers should keep an eye out for when looking for Fair Trade. While there may be many vendors selling fairly traded or direct trade items, Fair Trade San Diego is unable to hold those vendors accountable to the principles of Fair Trade.  Therefore, we promote items that are certified with the following organization and therefore held to the standards of fair trade put forth by each certifier. Fair Trade San Diego encourages vendors to consider having their fairly traded items certified with the following organizations as well.

Read more here for an explanation of labels.