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Saturday was World AIDS day which we spent with Rick and Kay Warren’s church in Orange County California at their global summit on AIDS and the church. Rather than write about the celebrities and powerful people in attendance, I thought I would instead tell the story of one of the women who make rugs for us.

Based just outside of Nairobi in Kenya, Beacon of Hope is an incredible business. There is not enough time to tell you of everything that it does – from HIV education, vocational skills training for women infected with AIDS, providing jobs making rugs and garments, looking after the orphans of those women who have passed through their business.

They describe the Kware Slum where they work: Depression, the resultant alcoholism and promiscuous living also lead to a high level of HIV infection. The fight to survive has led many to prostitution. It is no longer surprising to learn of families where the mother and her daughters are engaged in commercial sex, many times with the full knowledge and reluctant support of other needy family members. As these men move from hovel to hovel and sexually take advantage of these women, they leave behind a deep sense of hopelessness, disease and bitterness. After some time, the women become skeptical and they are driven by bitterness and hopelessness to infect others with HIV even by choice.

My wife and I have three of their beautiful and simple rugs in our home, and every time I see them I remember these women. Here is one of other stories.. 

Jerusha’s Story
I worked with my vet husband in Isinya, Kajiado District, which is not too far from here until he died. It was then that I discovered that I have AIDS.

Now, I don’t live very far from Beacon of Hope and when the people here started visiting us in our homes and bringing us food, talking to us, giving us medicine and telling us things we could do to keep healthy, and all about God, I wanted to know more.

So, when I heard that they are training women to weave carpets and earn their income in this way, I decided this is what I was looking for.
This scar on my neck…I got it in 1989…it goes all the way down my chest. I got it when a pressure stove I was lighting exploded in my face and my clothes caught fire.

This happens to many people in the slums because we cannot afford the safer cookers other people buy. We have to rely on the ones that use paraffin, …sometimes they are not made very well.

I thank God I can see, eat, and talk. There’s nothing I can do to change how I look. My beauty is gone, I can’t covet another person’s, I can’t change who I am, I can’t change the fact that I have AIDS, I don’t like to keep the hurt inside, sometimes it wells up; only crying for a long time can remove it.

Sometimes I feel like I could do something terrible. I don’t have friends where I stay, I don’t visit and I’m not visited. I live alone and I have to deal with my problems all by myself, this is because I have AIDS and people think I wanted to get it.

Sometimes I get sores and I itch but I have a cream, and I cough so I get medication and that helps. The house payment is a burden. It may seem like very little money for others, but for us it is still a lot of money and sometimes we don’t have it.

When the men come looking for us, they give us money but they also give us disease. We become weaker and weaker. We need to keep away from them. I have watched many of my friends die because they don’t realize this. I need to keep myself alive.
 

It’s been an extremely busy time at Trade as One these last few weeks, with events in homes, in churches and in universties from Atlanta to Austin, from Grand Rapids to San Diego and all the way back home again in the San Francisco Bay Area. The response to our new product set has been overwhelmingly positive and we have been sometimes struggling to keep up with demand. Here’s what some of the churches we have partnered with have been saying:
“In one weekend, our congregation went from being unaware of Trade as One to being wildly enthusiastic and eagerly supportive.  It’s one thing to feel a desire and a call to respond to global poverty.  It is another to find a means of doing something that actually makes a difference.  Trade as One has created a channel for that kind of response.  Its vision is compelling and urgent.  Their beautiful goods only make supporting them that much easier and that much more delightful.  We are definitely excited to have them back and to build an on-going connection!”
Mark Labberton, Lead Pastor, First Presbyterian Church, Berkeley

“I want to say thank you to Trade as One. God will do amazing things around the globe through you, and I want to commit that we want to be a part of what He’s up to. Maybe tomorrow will be different for a little girl and a little boy somewhere in the world because we had the courage to do something different together tonight.”
Joel Thomas, Lead Pastor, Singles Ministry, North Point Church, Atlanta

“The Trade as One event that our church hosted was a tremendous success on two levels. First, if trade drives the global market, then one of the best ways that American Christians can fight for justice is to be responsible in what we buy and from whom we buy it. Voting with our dollar can ensure that the impoverished and marginalized are paid for their labors in a manner that is fair.
Second, in an era in America where the church is becoming less relevant and more privatized, this event demonstrated to our community that our church cares deeply about global issues such as poverty and human trafficking, and that it is also often more equipped to mobilize people to action than are other organizations. Many secularists came to the event and had their paradigms of an uncaring and irrelevant church totally shattered. To have our culture’s caricature of the church redrawn has already begun to move people to consider it for what we want it be - a community that is called by Jesus to bring good news to the poor and to set the captives free!”
Bart Garrett, Lead Pastor, Christ Church of Berkeley

The only legitimate apologetic remaining for western Christians is our love in action. Nathan and the entire Trade as One team gave our faith community a new vision of how Christ sees our world and calls us to act.  Not only did they give us a greater understanding of our participation in God’s kingdom but they also gave us a tangible way to make a difference in our world.                         
          Andy Lewis, Lead Pastor, Faith Community Church, Santa Cruz
 

Consumerism - the notion that the more we consume the better off we will be - is the idolatry of our times. The culture that it instills is powered by a self-centeredness which is seen as not just acceptable, but the very foundation of how commerce and society is understood to work. The behavior that it drives is the opposite of loving God and others with everything we have. It places my temporal and manipulable desires at the center of my own little universe. As the dominant way of deriving meaning, it is responsible for countless neuroses fed by corporations whose shareholders insist on ever increasing profits, and it is responsible for near runaway exploitation of this earth’s natural resources. 

Is all lost? Is it possible to subvert consumerism, to inject a virus into it that causes us to slow down, consider the needs of others, whilst at the same time redefining our place in the world? I believe it is. Fair Trade is a movement that attempts to do just that. Trade as One is using trade as the means to mutually benefit the poor, the sick and the enslaved as well as meeting our needs. The poor need jobs, not handouts. Through trade we can become aware of the needs of people in some of the darkest places in the world.

What better time than this Christmas when so much gift buying is so meaningless, to buy a gift that gives a job to someone with HIV in Kenya, to a women taken from human trafficking in Thailand or to a genocide orphan in Rwanda? Churches around the country are starting to wake up to their role as thought and practice leaders in subverting consumerism to bring hope and positive change to some of these dark places. With Trade as One, we harness and subvert a very powerful engine of change - commerce.

Taking part in events where issues of justice form the agenda means that I often get the opportunity say what is on my mind and heart. Unfornately, only the few at the event ever get to hear it, so here is a video of me speaking to a group of singles at North Point Church.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r_u8Aym1DI 

My friend Brian McLaren has a new book coming out soon called ‘Everything must change - Jesus, Global Crises and a Revolution of Hope’. You can check him out reading from his book and how Trade as One fits into the hope that he has.

You can check out the dialog around the issues raised in his book at www.deepshift.org

This week saw the completion of our DVD project that tells the story of Trade as One and of two of our supply partners, Hagar Design in Cambodia and NightLight in Thailand. You can view the four minute stories at:

I had the privilege of meeting Zach Hunter today at our church. Zach is a 15 year old wunderkind who got angry at the age of 12 at the fact that tens of millions of slaves exist around the world and no one seemed to be doing very much about it. His answer was to get teenagers in American households (and now UK, Australian and other countries) to find all the loose change hanging about their house and give it to a charity he set up to fight to get slaves freed. In the US alone there is estimated to be roughly $10.5 billion in loose change kicking about in trays, jars and table tops. Dormant capital that needs to be put to use. It would cost an estimated $10.3 billion to eradicate modern day slavery.

His project is called ‘Loose Chains to Loosen Chains’. Go check out what he is doing at http://www.lc2lc.org/ and buy the book.

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If you are a member of the blogging generation you could let your friends (as well as those total strangers who read what you write) know about Trade as One, by sharing information about us on your website or blog. And we’d love any links to us too!

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Last night I spoke again at Stanford to the Intervarsity graduates christian group. We gathered to study a passage of the New Testament in Mark 4 of three stories Jesus told about how the work he initiates takes root and grows. The surprising thing is that it is to be seen with small beginnings, sometimes fruitless efforts, but a work that eventually has enormous long term effects. We want big plans, rapid growth, huge success. He says that the mark of authenticity is small beginnings, not many people understanding, and unseen growth happening that eventually produces something big.

“Change the University and you change the world.” Whenever I have spoken and met with students I come away full of optimism about their grasp of the important issues the world faces, and their determination to do something about them. I know that this is a view that my friend Steve Haas at World Vision shares. If you have a spare 3 minutes, check out the work they are doing that is raising awareness of the issue of AIDS at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0D_CwX_0eUÂ� . Small beginnings have already led to much action.

Last Sunday I spoke at an event hosted by Women of Global Action (http://www.globalaction.nu/woga.php� ) in LA. The subject was the issue of sex trafficking and what is being done to combat it. The following is an extract of my message:

“The poverty of financial and physical resources that leads people to mortgage their bodies, their labor, their children just to survive is the fuel for the trafficker and abuser’s fire. As is poverty of access to the rule of law. Extreme poverty dehumanizes and strips away the image of God placed in every human being. Once that is done, then women and children become reduced to a cash value.Â�

What partners of ours like NightLight and others like them do is fish the near-dead bodies out of the river – the women and children who have been traded for cash. It breaks our hearts to see them and we need to do everything we can to support these groups as they confront evil on the very front lines.

I want to take our thinking a few stages further back as well. We ALSO need to ask the question of why are the bodies getting thrown in there in the first place? Go upstream and what do you find? You will find crushing, dehumanizing poverty that creates vulnerability on one hand and you find predatory behavior on the other. Now, organizations like IJM do fabulous work in bringing the force of the law to bear on the predators and abusers in order to dramatically reduce their freedom of behavior. They stand on the river banks issuing credible threats to those who throw people in for profit or pleasure. BUT what is also needed are ways to provide sustainable incomes so that the vulnerable don’t go anywhere near that river.

What Trade as One does is sell products that provide incomes for operations like NightLight and also for dozens of other operations working almost exclusively with women’s groups among the poorest of the poor. For every job you create there you increase the economic umbrella of protection from trafficking for that woman and her children.”Â�

As well as meeting old friends from LA Loves (who were instrumental in organizing the event) and the chair of NightLight’s US board, I also met a group called Tiny Stars (http://www.tinystars.org/Â� ). They are a very innovative 501(c)3 organization that use a network of people around the world to gather evidence on US citizens who travel abroad for the purposes of paedophilic abuse. There is now a law that allows this behaviour to be prosecuted as if it happened on American soil, so the abuser is no longer safe travelling to a foreign country to carry out their crime. They do some great work - check them out.

Given the number of players in the Fair Trade space that are non-profits, Trade as One had to spend a lot of time looking into and debating the subject of whether we should be for- or not-for profit as an organization. There are pros and cons both ways. We decided to take the for profit route. Here are the main reasons (you can see more as FAQs on the website)

1. The pool of capital available to you as a for profit is orders of magnitude larger than as a non-profit. This means that if you have a good plan that is sustainable (i.e. profitable) then you can grow a lot faster than eeking out growth from cashflow and donor funding.
2. Unless you are a trading arm of a large well-funded non-profit, getting donor funding is often non-trivial in itself, often requiring multiple rigorous reporting requirements to each of your major donor agencies, and spending a high percentage of your overhead on raising funds continually. That can create a burdensome overhead that gets in the way of creating business value.
3. To be a force that competes in the rough and tumble world of capturing consumer mind and wallet share, Fair Trade must become a way of doing business that is sustainable and not propped up by donations, volunteer labor, or deep pockets of individuals in it to feel like they are using their wealth in a philanthropic way. If it remains true that the only way to make a small fortune in this space is to start with a large one, this space will never take off. Not that making fortunes are the objective, but I think you get my point of sustained value creation vs cash drain.
4. If after articulating what we are about as a company and how we are run, the people we are selling to still think that non-profit = saintly do-gooder and for-profit = greedy money-grabbing self-interested capitalist then we move on to find more enlightened customers. And there are plenty of them. They just don’t look like traditional Fair Trade buying people.

At the end of the day whether you are for or not-for profit you have to run a profitable business or you will die. The question is therefore one of what tax code you operate under and the messages to your market on the issue. We may well end up with a non-profit arm that is aligned to our vision because a number of times people have asked how they can give money to support what we do.

fair trade