The Fashion 4 Development group in DC recently featured our “alternate sleeve” tee shirts, ball caps, Fair Trade soccer balls, and Fair Trade rugby balls at their swank DC Fashion Week event. 

For those of you who requested ways to help with your design skillz - particularly the high school and college students at Convergence this year - we now have two design contests underway.

Whatever your skill set, put it to work for the Fair Trade movement and help us tell our story via film or Flash.

You could make Fair Trade Sports ad tiles - like this Dream of Summer one - for your MySpace or campus web pages. Or a normal banner ad, an e-card, a sticker, a poster, or whatever else your brain thinks of.

When you think of Fair Trade,  Respect, and sports, what do you see? Feel free to use our brand elements. Send us your stuff and we’ll feature them on our sites. Our design team will pick one winner each month to receive a Fair Trade Sports ball of their choice.

The second contest is to design your own Fair Trade Sports ball. We’ll pick the best design every three months and produce the next set of sports balls based on your design…in addition to massive amounts of fame, you get (of course) a free sports ball of your design.

Sketch out your thoughts and snap a digital photo or use this template for Illustrator|PhotoShop. Email it to us and you’ll be entered into the contest. Multiple entries allowed. Have fun!

A complete sitemap listing of all our posts, by category, is below. Enjoy looking around.

And don’t forget our store pages:

• Sweatshop-free apparel
• Fair Trade futsal balls
• Fair Trade rugby balls
• Fair Trade soccer balls (indoor and outdoor)
• Fair Trade volleyballs (indoor and outdoor)

Please contact us if we can be of further assistance.

Here is a brief update from our Talon Fair Trade Welfare Society in Sialkot, Pakistan. This is the sister organization to the workers’ union at Talon, the manufacturer of Fair Trade Sports balls.

I’d like to give you a direct glimpse - in their own words - of what the crew at Talon are achieving with the extra funds we pay through Fair Trade premiums (reminder: we do not pass these premiums on to you - we have no multi-million dollar TV ads to support).

Here’s an insightful excerpt from the reporting:

Micro credit is for income generation.Now people living happily life. Health Facilities.

Worker,stitcher and their families getting 100% free of cost medical facility.This facility is not available in over all sialkot scenario.Not even in Govt sector,multinational companies.In these companies and in government sector have specific limit for medical.But for our workers have no limit.We provide them 100% free.

If we consider employee status over all in Pakistan factory workers and football stitcher are third level workers,but our workers availing 1st class facilities in medical programme.

One thing very special here is no classicfication every workers and managerial level worker availing the facilities from the same listed hospital.Mean we have equel ploicy for all workers and managers.

Here is a PDF I made of the micro-credit loans. The addition of the highlighting is mine to call your attention to the type of projects being funded: reselling milk, welding shops, buffalo, carts, sweet shops, tractors, and a bakery.

Please consider telling two friends right now about our fairly traded soccer balls, and continue to support this wonderful work around the world!

I don’t read alot of magazines - would rather read books - but one of the few that has broken through the clutter to get my attention is Motto Magazine. With a tagline of “Purpose, Passion, and Profit” they are speaking my language.

One of my favorite features that Kevin Salwen, Anita Sharpe, and their team of writers use as a thread to tie each issue together is the question, “What’s your motto?”

As I’ve mentioned before, my motto is quite simply, “Help others” - the application of which has morphed over my career. Right now it means dividing my time between launching a new Fair Trade business (Fair Trade Sports) and a new abolitionist non-profit (Not For Sale Campaign).

I love reading other people’s motto that they feature in the magazine. By definition, a motto can’t be that long, so it forces people to boil their essence down to a single thought.

And it’s always nice when one of the few magazines you read calls to do a blurb on your new company. I was stoked to read that we made it onto their “Things We Like” list. It’s at your local newstand now.

Images like this make me smile. Sent by Marit Krueger, a good friend working in Kisumu, Kenya with her husband and kids.
 
This is Elijah Odhiambo, an orphan who lives with them on their Miwani farm and is in the public school nearby.

Marit says, “The footballs [soccer] and volleyballs arrived intact! The boys are happy, happy, and ready to play! Thank you for including the extra needles and for blessing this community! The kids are so happy!”

I look forward to the day when this company generates much more than just a couple of  thousand dollars a year for children’s charities. Please consider popping off an email or two right now to friends to share our mission to help at-risk children.

As we mentioned earlier, Cabrini College in PA grabbed the honor of “first ever” for a campus wallyball tourney recently. Here are the photos from the CRS “Play Fair Trade Fair” event.

I’m digging the use of our brand stickers as an apparel accessory.

To quote from Jessica Hagerty’s article:

“The volleyballs we will be using were made from people in another country and we can feel confident that they earned fair wages,” Coordinator of Student-Athlete Wellness Jackie Neary said.

Fair Trade is an association of fair trade wholesalers, retailers and producers whose members are committed to providing fair wages and good employment opportunities to economically disadvantaged artisans and farmers worldwide.

Sports balls are one of Fair Trade’s many products. Other products include chocolate, coffee, sugar, cotton products, honey and flowers.

The event is supported by the athletic department’s director of athletics and recreation Leslie Danehy, assistant director of recreation Orlin Jespersen, administrative coordinator Amanda Eckenroad and Neary.

“The athletic and recreation departments are very proud to be participating in this event because it is a very important issue that people should be aware of,” Neary said.

A soccer tournament using Fair Trade soccer balls is another event that the departments wish to pursue.

Does your high school or college campus have a Fair Trade initiative? Let’s see how many more Fair Trade tourneys we can get going with intramural systems and club sports teams!

More Cabrini photos here.

For those of you who have not yet seen this in the news…there is a fellow in the UK who is living on nothing but Fairtrade items for two weeks. Fair Trade bananas, nuts, rice…you get the picture. His name is (of course) Fairtrade Man.

His mission is noble and he seems to be quite a nice fellow. So we sent him a birthday gift, including the trademark Fair Trade Sports tee shirt with one orange sleeve, and a soccer ball (a.k.a. football).

Here’s the video:



Happy Birthday, Fairtrade Man!

Interesting intersections that happen when you are least expecting it are the ones that make me smile the most.

Yesterday I was glancing through my Google Alerts and found a reference to both fairtrade soccer balls and Fair Indigo, the hip new apparel company from Madison, WI.

I popped over to Just Things - a good source for an “applied counter-economics” perspective on the Fair Trade movement - to read through the candid  interview with Fair Indigo’s Bill Bass and Rob Behnke.

Bill was walking journalist Steve Herrick through his design department when they spotted one of our fairly traded children’s soccer balls. An interesting and insightful discussion about the pros/cons of partnerships between fair trade companies ensued.

I’m already a fan of their apparel line. One of my favorite shirts is their logo tee - amazingly soft and lots of folks ask about the tagline “style with a conscience” when I wear it around town.

Position yourself as a true hipster at the local park by snagging your own fairtrade children’s soccer ball *before* the next Fair Indigo catalog comes out. Then you’ll be able to show your kids the catalog and reap their adoration for being on the cutting edge of hipness. At least that’s what I’m planning to do.

:)

Today is International Women’s Day, the global celebration day connecting all women around the world - inspiring them to achieve their full potential. International Women’s Day celebrates the collective power of women past, present and future.

We’ve seen this with our female Pakistani stitchers like Razia. Through the Fair Trade monies that you help us generate, Razia and her colleagues implemented the first health care plan in their industry.