Shop Local. Support Global.
When: Sat., Sept. 19, 9 a.m.-2 p.m.
Phone: 440-333-7709
Email: manager@oneworldshopcle.org
admission: FREE
See Facebook event at: rb.gy/jg5yeb
This summer has been a challenge for most small businesses and organizations, especially those in fair trade, who serve a greater mission than profit alone. We're joining up with some of your local fair traders for an outdoor Fair Trade Flea to provide an opportunity to sell safely & make up for those missed markets to generate much needed income for farming and artisan families in the Global South. We hope you'll join us on Saturday, September 19!
Artisan & micro-enterprise vendors include: Esperanza Threads, INTO, IRTF, Neal's Yard, Noonday Collection, Revy Fair Trade, Storehouse Tea, Threads Worldwide, and participants in the US Together-Cleveland Microenterprise & Development Program: Syrian Soul Bracelets (Mohamad Almasri, Syria), Adolphe Musanga (Author of From Congo to Cleveland, Democratic Republic of Congo), Mounga African Bags (Mounga Mfawume, Democratic Republic of Congo), Kubra Kulshi & Kalashi (Kubra Alhilali, Iraq)
Why Fair Trade?
IRTF works towards justice and equity in the distribution, access to, and participation in the production and consumption of the world’s resources for the people of Central America and Colombia. IRTF examines the corporate-dominated globalization of the economy through the lens of people in Central America and Colombia and how their reality is linked to ours in NE Ohio. IRTF challenges the dominant economic model that results in exploitation both at home and abroad. IRTF offers an alternative through Fair Trade.
Fair trade is a trade model that sets a series of standards to ensure fair wages and human dignity for producers, community investment, environmental sustainability, and more. IRTF promotes Fair Trade as an alternative trade model to the conventional free market system of trade that currently dominates our world and further divides us into “haves” and “have nots.”
At outreach tables throughout the year, IRTF sells fair trade items—raising tens of thousands of dollars—so that artisans and farmers in Latin America can earn a living wage. Fair trade is an important of IRTF’s human rights mission: to call together people in NE Ohio to walk in solidarity with oppressed peoples of Central America and Colombia to achieve peace, justice, human rights and systemic transformation through nonviolence.
Food Action Forum
Sign up for the Food Action Forum! The Food Action Forum (organized by Equal Exchange, the first fair trade coffee cooperative in the US), is working to build a democratic brand that connects small farmers in the Global South to consumers in the Global North. After IRTF first introduced NE Ohioans to Equal Exchange coffee in the mid-1990s, Heinen’s became the first grocer chain to sell Equal Exchange in all its stores. IRTF and Equal Exchange have been close partners and friends ever since.
The monthly online Food Action Forum meetings allow all of us to connect, build community, and have space to push our campaigns forward and engage in actions out there in your communities. To be successful in realizing the original Fair Trade vision, we need to deepen involvement and participation in our model. In doing this, we go back to the best that Alternative Trade has always been about: innovation, global solidarity, social imagining and learning, and economic justice. This will be a long, slow process and a great challenge. We need your buying support, your investing support, and your political support.
Join us as we work together to build a democratic brand that connects small farmers in the Global South to consumers in the Global North.
