Trade As One

Josh Catron is one of our summer interns and a recent Stanford grad.

My name is Josh Catron and I spent the summer working as an intern with Trade as One. After my six weeks with Trade as One I can truly say I enjoyed the experience. From Tuesday BBQ lunches to long days doing inventory, I had a great time working with everyone on the Trade as One team.

But the most rewarding part of my internship was being able to hear the stories of how the livelihoods of people all over the world are improving because of Fair Trade principles. The focus of my internship with a marketing project designed to help customers understand the positive impact they are making in the lives of workers around the world when they purchase our products. This opportunity allowed me to personally talk with representatives from each of our producers. And while each producer had a different story to tell, they all spoke of the same theme: Fair Trade has brought economic empowerment, social dignity, and a better way of life to hard working people across the globe. I feel blessed to have had this experience and been able to be a part of a company who is based on these principles.

The beautiful jewelry of NightLight tells stories of lives rebuilt and hope restored. Kay is one of these lives.

Kay was five months pregnant when her mamasan brought her to NightLight for assistance. No longer able to work in the bar, she had nowhere to go. Kay moved into the shelter and started working in NightLight’s jewelry business. Four months later Kay’s beautiful baby girl was born, and while most women leave their children with grandparents to find work, NightLight’s child care center provided a way for Kay to raise her daughter while she continued to work. Kay’s heart is full of joy and she has become one of NightLight’s primary leaders for morning worship before the day’s jewelry production begins.

Nightlight was launched in 2005 to provide a sustainable path out of poverty and sexual abuse for Bangkok’s young women. After observing the situation around them, the founders of NightLight set a goal to combat the sexual exploitation of women and children in the Nana/Sukhumvit area of Bangkok, an area rife with sexual abuse, trafficking, and extreme poverty.

Through life-on-life ministry NightLight seeks to meet the physical, emotional, and spiritual needs of women in prostitution, their children, and those children brought illegally into Thailand to financially support their families by selling items in the bars, often through sexual exploitation. By building relationships, along with providing a center that offers emergency aid, educational and employment opportunity, emergency child care, language tutoring, literacy training, biblical teaching and healing for their community, NightLight is truly bringing light into the darkness as they impact the lives of the women and children in Bangkok who have escaped the horrors of the sex industry.

Trade as One is proud to partner with NightLight and offer these brave women a chance to connect with women in America who would love nothing more than for the jewelry they wear to be an expression of freedom and justice.

Laura Piper is one of our summer interns, helping Trade as One out with project management, graphic design and marketing.

When people typically think of organizations doing “good,” what most often comes to mind are charities, churches, non-profits, and philanthropists. In conversations with friends and family recently, I’ve been amazed by how hard it is for us to break out of this idea that if you want to do good and make a difference in the world, you need to work for a non-profit. And if you want to be successful and make money, you should work for a for-profit business. It’s almost as if we’ve made some a simple formula out of it:

Non-profits = Do good and impart change.
For-profits = Simply make a profit.

But in my mind, these things don’t have to be mutually exclusive. While I have no doubt that non-profits and churches are doing immense amounts of good in the world, and I am so thankful for all that they do, I am continually inspired by companies that are breaking this separation and seeking to not only make a profit, but to do “good” at the very same time.

This idea is exactly what drew me to the mission behind Trade as One: “To use sustainable business to break cycles of poverty and dependency in the developing world.” And it is also what got me excited about interning with them this summer (…along with the hope of keeping busy and making a difference with my time, while I search for a full-time job).

I’m about six weeks into my internship and there is no doubt that the experience has been a great one! Not only am I learning about the direct impact of our purchases on those living in the developing world, but I’m excited to be part of some of the numerous projects in the works at Trade as One, each with the goal of helping to tell the stories of lives being changed and hope being restored through your simple and ongoing decisions to purchase fair trade.

One of our friends Jenni Keast wrote this story for us about the artisans of AITA. She lent us her writing talent, so we wanted to share it with you! Read on to learn more about AITA and the creativity that continues to thrive in the developing world. AITA is a fair trade business committed to building long-term relationships with many artist communities who live and work in the beautiful land of the Zulu. They help keep long-standing families and communities together through the preservation of traditional art forms.  The name AITA is township slang from the new South Africa; it’s a cheerful greeting between friends and strangers alike.

As the world is going wireless at a dizzying speed, one Zulu province in South Africa is going backward––using once-discarded telephone wire to bring some much-needed modern prosperity to its beleaguered people, while still weaving in the communal traditions of the past.

If you look at what discarded plastic-coated telephone wire looks like on the ground, it’s an unsightly mess––good for only one thing: disposal.  Yet for the men and women living in the Zulu province of KwaZulu–Natal, a proud community of people who once felt “disposed of” themselves during the bitter and racially divisive years of apartheid, discarded telephone wire has evolved into “ a thing of beauty and a joy forever” ––in a way that would surprise even the poet who penned those words. 

As the story goes, on a warm and muggy mid-1960s’ night…

Read more

We’re all back from San Antonio and thoroughly enjoying sub-100 degree temperatures back in California. Nathan George spent some time with Doug Robins, one of the teaching pastors at BRCC, and was interviewed about Trade as One and fair trade in each of their five services. The teaching for the weekend was from the book of James, and focused on the need to treat workers fairly.

Overall it was a fantastic weekend, where we got to connect with yet another amazing church in Texas, enjoyed San Antonio despite the heat, and created some desperately needed employment for our producers in the developing world. Today we’ve got an amazing team of volunteers here in the warehouse from Compassion Network helping us pack up all of the orders from the event. Now the real work begins!

A quick recap of things we learned at BRCC:

1. Texas LOVES fair trade (we already knew this, given our connections with BGCT, Woodlands, Ecclesia, Riverbend, FBC Austin, Wilshire, ChaseOaks, etc.)
2. Kelly Schuetz and her volunteer team are absolute stars
3. Shelton Green is one of our favorite people in the world
4. Olive Oil+ 105 degree heat= Corks unexpectedly shooting dozens of feet into the air. Awesome and kinda terrifying.
5. San Antonio is a really cool city
6. Bandera Road Community Church is an amazing community

Next event on the horizon is “Slavery No More” a justice night at Shepherd of the Hills in Porter Ranch, CA. We can’t wait.