Fair Trade Guide

Hi Oxfamers! Me again. I had an interesting proposal today from the manager of Ten Thousand Villages. Apparently members of WUSC at Huron and the TTV management team (which includes me) are going to be putting together a Fair Trade Guide to London over the summer and early fall, with the hopes that perhaps in the fall there will be a "Walk the Guide" evening event where people can come together and visit some of the best alternative and fair trade food and retail locations in the downtown core. I will personally be working on this guide, however I was asked to approach you all in the hopes that since we discussed an idea for us doing a guide at the meeting on Monday, hopefully we would be willing to work as part of a joint "task force" in putting this guide together. As the saying goes "two heads are better then one" and this sounds like a great way to work toegether with other UWO clubs like we had discussed, plus with businesses in the community, and also with so many people putting this together, it won't fall to one or two people to do all the work. So, any thoughts? Will I be able to say "yup, Oxfam is in on this" ?? Please respond back on the comments section to this blog as I'd love to hear what everyone thinks of this idea. Please share your thoughts and ideas and creativity as well, plus if everyone pretty much thinks we should do this, I'd love to know who really wants to help us out with this as something of a "summer project." (The planning will probably happen in the months between now and I'd guess at the absolute latest, October) Looking forward to hearing your thoughts. I will find out more information if anyone has more questions.

To give you some more history on this proposal, the idea came around after a discussion at TTV one day about how there are towns in England whose city councils have worked hard to make them Fair Trade towns. Canturbury is one of these places. The shops in these towns are all Fair Trade, so our thoughts during this discussion was "wouldn't it be great if we could work together to really raise the issue and to promote fair trade in the hopes that one day city hall will catch on and maybe make some moves to try and attract more fair trade to the city of London?" One of the ways to really actively engage the community would be to make a clear map/guide of fair trade locations in London, and to actually promote the use of it by having a "walk" night as I mentioned above. So anyways, Tori, from WUSC is really interested and will approach that group I believe, and some of the other volunteers at TTV will also be involved. This is still in the early stages so any willing participation of Oxfam members is greatly welcomed.

Thanks