Saturday, December 17, 2011

Believing in Fair Trade

From the time I was first introduced to fair trade I thought it was a good idea.  I first learned of the concept when I was living in Northern Ireland in 1999.  Derry, where I was living, became a “Fair Trade Town”.  A special event was held at City Hall and I attended.  There I got to sample fair trade tea, chocolate, and coffee and I heard a brief presentation on what fair trade is all about.  The mix of social mission and business was appealing.  That event had a big impact on me.  It happened right about the same time I needed to choose a topic for my Master’s Thesis.  With a bit of effort in convincing my professors it was a suitable topic, fair trade became the subject of my Thesis.  The research I did in the 6 months or so it took me to complete my paper made me a believer that fair trade was effectively and efficiently providing much needed employment and resources to families and communities in developing countries.  It’s a long story that I won’t go into here but it was through my research that I became introduced to Global Gifts where I am now employed.
Senora Toshinada, Maruca, and Joel swap stories about clients over lunch. 
Though my belief in fair trade has remained strong, it is always nice when I have it reaffirmed.  My recent experience with Manos Amigas has done just that.  During the recent capacity building training that Manos Amigas hosted for their artisan partners, I had a chance to speak with several different people about their work and their thoughts on fair trade.   For lunch one day we all went to a nearby restaurant in Lima.  Alison and I sat with 3 artisans during the meal.  When talking about their business, all three shared stories of clients who treated them badly.  For example, Joel spoke about a woman who bought from them who was very friendly in their initial interactions.  She would ask about his family and about his mother who was ill.  But then when he went to her shop to deliver the order, she would barely acknowledge him and treated him rudely.  In contrast, Manos Amigas helped the family buy medication for his mother when she was near the end of her life.  He was also grateful that Manos Amigas loaned the family money that was later forgiven for a coffin when his mother died.  This sort of giving and assistance is not always a part of fair trade.  But the respect and appreciation for producers it represents is very much a part of fair trade.
Yannina, Director of Manos Amigas, with Senora Toshinado
We also heard stories of mistreatment through lack of payment.  In one case, a group was taken advantage of when they worked with a middleman who delivered products for them. But after he delivered the products and received payment, he ran off with the money rather than paying the group what they had earned.  While these types of stories don’t necessarily represent business as usual in the non-fair trade market, I believe they do represent a vulnerability that the artisans have because they are often quite desperate to take whatever opportunity that may lay before them or at least appear to lay before them.
Yannina and Luigi (a buyer from an Italian fair trade organization) walk to visit several artisan workshops in this neighborhood.

But treating producers with basic respect and dignity is just part of the fair trade equation.  Another critcal contrast is the 50% downpayment that is made when an order is placed by a fair trade buyer.  Sometimes orders are quite large involving thousands of individual pieces to be made.  Not only does the 50% downpayment provide needed income for materials and paying workshop employees, it also provides confidence that the buyer won’t walk out on the deal mid-way through without paying.  When I asked how much non-fair trade buyers would pay in advance for an order, the answer came back “not much”, 10-20% or sometimes nothing at all.
Leonidas stands at the entrance of his home and ceramics workshop.  He has been selling to Manos Amigas for 20 years.

Manos Amigas works with around 87 artisan workshops.   Each workshop has a handful of employees which increases or decreases depending on the level of orders they are receiving.  This means several hundred people (nearly 1,000 during peak times) may be receiving employment through Manos Amigas at any given time.  When I have had the opportunity to talk with some of these folks I will often ask, “Is fair trade important to you?  Does it make much of a difference?  Maybe a little bit or not much?”  Over and over again the person I’m speaking with eyes become big and the look on their face is emphatic, “Yes, it is very important!” they respond. 

It moves me to know that I am part of a community of people, a movement, which is impacting lives and setting a just standard of business through fair trade.  Manos Amigas is one fair trade exporter among a dozen or more significantly sized fair trade businesses working in Peru.  Each business represents a community of varying size of folks who are enjoying being part of the fair trade system.  I would estimate that the reach of that impact is felt by several thousand people in the country of Peru although I can only make a guess.  Artisans like Daniel, exporters like Manos Amigas, importers like Ten Thousand Villages and SERRV, and stores like Global Gifts, and the people who buy these beautifully made products are part of a system of business that respects people and the planet, reaches out to those who lack opportunity, and I believe brings people around the world a bit closer together.
Daniel a ceramics artisan, Yannina an exporter, Luigi an importer, and Sam a store manager represent the chain that is involved with fair trade.  Only missing was Alison, the consumer, who was taking the photo.  Later Luigi asked for another photo to be taken with Simon included as the "future of fair trade".  Could Walmart take this picture?  :)
When I consider the significant impact fair trade is having in Peru and then I imagine the multiplied impact of fair trade throughout the world, I can’t help but be proud of the work we are doing at Global Gifts and the work being done within the fair trade movement.  Within this series of thoughtful transactions that represent fair trade business is a place I am happy to be.




Thursday, December 1, 2011

One Month with Manos Amigas

We have now completed just over one month volunteering with Manos Amigas.  It has certainly been a busy  time.  It is hard to know where to start writing.
We arrived at Manos Amigas with a lot of unanswered questions.   What type of work would we be doing?  Were the folks who run Manos Amigas really even that excited about our being there?  Was our work appreciated?  Were we going to have opportunities to work with artisans as well as the administrators of the organization?  These questions swirled in our heads during our initial days and even weeks with Manos Amigas.
Our communication with Manos Amigas before we started was more limited than I would have liked.  Yannina who runs the organization is clearly very busy and we wanted to limit our initial email exchanges as much as we could when we were making our plans to come here.  We got the impression she was busy because there was often a delay of several days or more when we sent an email and we knew she was doing a lot of travelling related to some of the tours Manos Amigas organizes.   So we were really taking a bit of a leap of faith in choosing Manos Amigas as our volunteer destination.   Apparently they felt the same way about us.
Even during our initial emails, Yannina let us know they had not had a lot of luck with past volunteers.  Despite our work experience, despite sending detailed resumes, even though we were recommended by a mutual colleague, it felt as if we were accepted as volunteers somewhat reluctantly.   We have recently heard some of the horror stories about past volunteers which helped us better understand their hesitation.  Early on we decided that we had to prove ourselves as capable and helpful. 
Our first task was helping Manos Amigas with their website.  We had noticed before we left the states that their website was no longer up.  We also were no longer receiving responses to emails we sent Yannina and we thought these two issues might be related.  It turned out they were.  It is a long story but it sounds like because of a dispute with their former web designer, they lost their website address and their email addresses.  By the time we arrived at Manos Amigas, their website had been down for over six weeks although they were able to set up new email addresses before then. 
The first day we started work, Yannina asked if we had experience with websites.  Alison and I both had limited experience in website development and upkeep.  Neither one of us are experienced designers but within a matter of a few days, we were able to get a functioning website up and running for them.  For an organization that ships products to some 21 countries and works with 87 artisan workshops, having a functioning website is critical. 

A screenshot of the new website, www.manos-amigas.com.pe
While Alison has continued to make improvements to their website and began developing their product catalog, I shifted my focus to their annual “remate” or clearance sale.  Each year Manos Amigas holds a sale of their old sample items and of items made for shipment but for one reason or another never shipped.  I was put in charge of managing this sale and Alison provided much needed help with this as well.

Manos Amigas has a nice showroom within their office building/warehouse.  It is filled with natural light and is ideal for displaying products.  However in the showroom they have pieces of plywood set on top of stacks of old wooden crates that they use for display tables.  When I arrived, every flat surface was covered with different types of products.  And under these makeshifts display tables were boxes and boxes of old product, often ceramics that were thrown in the boxes at varying levels of care.  And then I was shown the really big boxes that were full of a LOT MORE stuff that had to be stored in another room because they didn’t fit in the show room.  All of it” I was told should be put out for the remate.  I kept thinking of the Global Gifts staff and how each year it seems like an impossible task to put all the new holiday merchandise out on the floor in addition to stocking up on regular items for that busy time of year.  That experience served me well here.
In addition to displaying all of this product (more on that later) I was to price it.  About 25% of the product had a price on it and another 25% had a code or SKU but no price and the remaining 50% had neither.  If it had a price, great, with some cleaning it was ready to go.  If there was a code but no price, than I needed to take it into another room, and find the item in their database.  Especially for any Global Gifts staff that may be reading this, this database is an excel spreadsheet that literally is broken into about 15 tabs across the bottom and there are probably close to 40,000 to 50,000 SKU’s in the database.  So it is not necessarily a quick thing to find a sku.  For those items that don’t have a SKU it gets more complicated.  If the item didn’t have the SKU, I was to find a picture of it and the picture would be named with the sku.  Then I could look it up in the database.  To find the picture, I was to look through around 80 different artisan folders on the computer, to see which one of them might have made the item and therefore had the picture of the product I was looking for in their folder.  “Not exactly an efficient process” I thought.
After looking up enough product prices I thought I was getting the hang of what the prices would be without looking them up.  That coupled with the fact that I knew these products were really old and they were motivated to get rid of them made me feel comfortable enough to propose that rather than looking up all these prices (which would take forever) maybe I could just assign prices without looking them up.  After suggesting prices for several items to Yannina, she agreed that would be a good way for me to work going forward.  Things went much quicker from there.
Next came putting these products out for display.  When Mario introduced this project to me he took me to the second level of Manos Amigas which is still under construction.  Picture bare concrete floors and walls, piles of boards and scrap lumber, metal pipes and re bar sticking up out of the floor, sawhorses and other tools scattered around.  "Use any of this for display,” he said, pointing to the construction site material.  Old wooden crates, rough wood boards of varying lengths, a metal pole, rusty mattress springs were all up for grabs.  And it was all covered with a thick layer of dust.

An example of what I started working with.

I had fun rummaging through this material to figure out how to create displays from it.  And I enjoyed putting the product out and making it look the best I could.  It was interesting to open up the numerous old boxes to see what might be inside.  What wasn’t fun was finding many of the boxes were crawling with silverfish or discovering painted gourds full of sawdust from termites or other insects.  Every now and then my hands became so black handling product that I needed to wash them before going on.
A crate with a board on top creates nice levels for a sea of miniatures.
Another photo from the remate

This display of musical instruments was nearly bought out in the first two days :)

The sale has been going on now for a couple of weeks and it seems like it is off to a good start.  People come to shop every now and then.  Some days no one comes.  Mostly just friends of Yannina’s mom come and shop.  It’s a good thing Yannna’s mom has lots of friends.  At one moment there were 5 women all wanting to check out at once and no one seemed to get the concept of a line.  In addition the women were all giving me special instructions (in Spanish) and for a while it got pretty crazy.  “I thought I was going to miss the Christmas rush this year” is what kept going through my head.

A broader view

More is happening but this post is already long so I’ll include more in another post.  We are now feeling like our work is appreciated and we are happy with our choice of volunteering with Manos Amigas.  Tomorrow artisans begin arriving for a capacity building training Manos Amigas is holding.  I’m doing a presentation on what makes a great selling product.  I’ll let you know how it goes.