the vg-r collective

Plenary Session III (10/1 at 10am): Kimberly Grimes, Made by Hand International

• Fair trade businesses are just like conventional businesses, but they care about all of the players.


• A new concept in business is the ?tri-line?, which encourages the consideration of social, economic and environmental costs (as opposed to the ?bottom line?.)


• ?Cooperation? should replace ?competition.?


• If we leave control in the hands of a few powerful corporations, we are not a democracy.



She expressed concern about a fair trade retailer talking about being in competition with another fair trade retailer, saying there?s no such thing as competition in this work because we?re all working toward the same goal. This idea was met with some criticism during the brief Q&A time. It?s an interesting question--is World Fare in competition with local churches who are selling fair trade coffee to congregants at the wholesale price through their denominations? Interfaith Coffee program? Or are we all just working toward the same goal?


Posted by Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma at 8:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Plenary Session II (10/1 at 10am): Joan Neal, Catholic Relief Services

• All members of the human family deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.


• John Paul II wrote a lot about global solidarity (commitment to the common good of all).

Posted by Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma at 8:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Plenary Session I (10/1 at 10am): Pedro Haslam, CECOCAFEN Organization, Honduras

• There are approximately 125,000 coffee farmers in Honduras.


• Communities that don?t sell their coffee through fair trade networks are suffering because the family units break up when members are forced to seek work in the cities.


• Fair trade allows self-sufficiency.


• Fair trade farmers invest back into their communities and experience solidarity (not charity) with consumers.


• We do have the power to transform the market.

Haslam said fair trade allows self-sufficiency which, in a way, it does because it empowers people with discretionary income that they can put toward food, education, home improvements, etc. Fair trade is very different in this sense from charity. However, there is also a dependence on people in the U.S., Europe and Canada to make principled purchasing choices. There is a fragile beauty in this symbiotic interconnectedness that is not present when buying choices are made based on cost alone, when the consumer becomes the end of the line instead of one participant in a circle of good.

Posted by Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma at 8:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Keynote Address (10/1 at 9am): Pauline Tiffen, Fair Trade Federation

?If you?re not outraged, you?re not paying attention.?

• The lie we?re being told is that the market is neutral (?free trade?) because no one controls it and therefore it is a force for good.


• Free trade doesn?t really exist because when one person wins, another person has to lose (zero sum).


• We need to focus on cultivating the relationships represented in the marketplace


• The market changes all the time--why? Economic reasons, trends, fashions, regulations/prohibitions, dumping, etc.


• The variety of products we have access to is a myth because they are controlled by so few companies (ex. the ?big 3? in chocolate of Hershey, Nestle and Cadbury)


• Even a representative from Nestle, when confronted by Tiffen, said his company was too small to make a difference.


• A business can respond to changed in the market without compromising values and mission.


• The success of fair trade in having a positive impact proves our interconnectedness and the far-reaching effects (positive or negative) or our everyday actions.


• If we are going to overcome ?the dark side of the force? (big sci-fi fan) we need to be more urgent, set goals, realize ourselves as both consumers and producers, and provide real alternatives for every product.

Posted by Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma at 7:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, here we are in the grand ballroom of the Holiday Inn in downtown Chicago, which appropriately enough is right across the street from the monolith of consumerism, the Chicago Merchandise Mart. We're gathered with 715 fair trade advocates, consumers, store managers, students, etc. Today's schedule includes two keynote addresses and two workshop sessions, along with a gathering in the evening featuring the Chicago Afrobeat Project.

Last night's opening address was so...satisfying. It's amazing how much it resembled a worship service in an evangelical church, with songs, a "sermon", video clips, powerpoint and lots of clapping. It's interesting that the Church struggles with questions of how to get more young people involved and how to achieve a higher degree of diversity--a large portion of the people in attendance are under 30 and the attendees come from 17 different countries. I'll let you draw the conclusions.

The keynote address last night was given by Kwabena Ohemeng-Tinyase of Kuapa Kokoo, an organization of 47,000 cocoa farmers in Ghana who united to receive a fair price for their beans. The co-op is also part owner of Divine Chocolate company, which gives them a say in the processing and marketing decisions that directly affect them. The most important statment he made was that "for people in our part of the world, fair trade is the solution to poverty." This is coming from the son of a cocoa farmer who represents small-scale farmers in a developing country. We are--the Church is--obligated to listen.

Well, this morning's activities are about to start. More later...

Posted by Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma at 5:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We just received word from Lutheran World Relief that they awarded us with a full scholarship to attend the upcoming Fair Trade Futures Conference in Chicago, IL. We would not have been able to attend without their financial assistance, so we are extremely grateful for their attentiveness to Fair Trade and for establishing a scholarship fund.

We are very much looking forward to the conference--learning more about Fair Trade, meeting others who are involved with Fair Trade in various capacities and discussing the future of Fair Trade. It should be quite an interesting experience ...

Posted by Rob Vander Giessen-Reitsma at 6:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

last night, world fare hosted the three rivers area chamber of commerce quarterly get together, an event that provides chamber members an opportunity to fraternize and to learn more about the host business.

all things considered, everything went well. we had about 40 to 50 people here, including many who had never been in the store before. because she is the person on whom such tasks fall, kirstin gave a brief presentation about fair trade and the store. folks were very receptive to the idea, which is always exciting.

unfortunately, we (and by we i mostly mean kirstin) made far too much food, despite losing an entire loaf of bread to one of the dogs shortly before the event started (he took it off the counter at home while it cooled). the house was happy to help with the leftover hummus, though.

we also have about 50 cups of coffee left over, so if you'd like to stop by for a cup today you're more than welcome. yes, i fully realize that one-day-old coffee isn't exactly the greatest, but it's such a waste to throw it all out.

Posted by Rob Vander Giessen-Reitsma at 1:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

oh, the madness! i know that the messes i get myself into are mostly due to poor planning on my part in not seeking the help of others before i actually need it, but am i allowed to be bitter anyway?

this saturday will be (potentially the first annual) A Chocolate Affair, an event to redeem Valentine's Day with awareness of fair trade chocolate and thoughtfulness about the farmers on the other end of our dark indulgences. we'll be having a cookie-decorating and Valentine making for kids, free fair trade coffee and tea, a bake sale featuring fair trade baked goods, and a bake-off--oh, the bake-off! i nearly ended up on my knees begging people at church yesterday to please-please-please enter the bake-off (apparently the chance to win a $50 gift certificate to World Fare is not incentive enough). happily, i got two more entries and we're up to seven, though five of them are from our church and i was hoping to get more people from the community involved. it seems as though people here are more than willing to support community events only when they're a tried-and-true three years old (past bore-risk stage).

but enough complaining. perhaps what i'm most excited about is the fact that my sister, breanne, will be entering the bake-off. she and her husband will make the two-hour drive out on Friday night and by Saturday morning, she'll be hard at work perfecting her famous Chocolate Mousse Cake. this will be the second weekend they've come out in a month, due to his broken thumb that's keeping him from work for six weeks--a broken bone can be a blessing.

i've never really felt that close to breanne. odd timing maybe. i was quite a merciless selfish brat as a child and she, a second child searching desperately for her identity. i left for college while i was too absorbed in my personal problems and afraid of her often overt hatred of me to develop a real relationship with her. we're only three years apart, but due to cut-offs, never had the opportunity of driving to school together or being one another's anchor in the tumultuous halls of high school.

and so, unfortunately, here we are at 24 and 21 years old, and still partially a mystery to one another. her husband has been much easier to get to know, once she stopped shielding him from our family (or the other way around?) long enough for his own personality to emerge, rather than the one we manufactured in its absence (the smoker who doesn't want to have anything to do with us). and discovering how wonderful he is has been a window allowing me to see how wonderful she really is and realize how much i've been missing her.

i can't wait until Saturday.

Posted by Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma at 6:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

even though i should really be working on the insane amount of homework i have to finish by tomorrow morning, i just posted some new pictures on the World Fare web site.

Posted by Rob Vander Giessen-Reitsma at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This article in The Detroit News is an indicator of why we enjoy running this small business in this small town.

Posted by Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

it's a little funny that my last blog entry was about how i hadn't posted anything for a while and then i proceeded by not posting anything for weeks. maybe it isn't funny and i'm just making excuses.

someday i'll get back to the story about how this whole thing happened, but that day won't be today.

a woman just came into the store and, after looking around for a while, proclaimed something like, "wow! i wouldn't have expected something like this in three rivers . . . "

how do i respond to such a statement? i guess it's nice that we could surprise them, but it's also a bit of a rip on the town we've chosen as our home. of course, it could simply be a sign that things are heading in the right direction. and then it gives me a little bit of a sinking feeling, like, "what did we get ourselves into?"

i suppose this scenario is an interesting experiment in expectation. one's expectations of others or of a community will determine their reaction to others or a community. so, if one expects a lot out of others, one will be disappointed frequently. and if one expects little out of others, one will often be surprised.

Posted by Rob Vander Giessen-Reitsma at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

we contacted a friend of ours who had several relationships with business people who might be interested in financing our idea. we held several meetings trying to develop a proposal attractive enough to entice a business person to invest. it was difficult, though, to make the idea for a fair trade store appealing from a strictly business perspective. we really needed to find someone with financial resources who was whole-heartedly behind the mission of fair trade.

around this time (early summer), we happened to be walking down main street looking at buildings (something we did quite often then) and we noticed a storefront for rent. we had known that the occupant was going to be moving across the street, but we hadn't paid too much attention to the space because we had never gotten a really good look at it (it was a consignment store and they needed to move because they had run out of space). they had just moved, though, so we could finally see what the space looked like empty. and it was beautiful--hardwood floors, tin ceilings.

we walked across the street to ask the owner about the space and she gave us a key to go inside to have a look around. so we went over, let ourselves in and fell in love. barring a few cosmetic changes (paint, lighting), the space was ready to go. the upstairs hadn't been used in about 30 years and was pretty raw, but, after renovation, it could potentially serve as an apartment. the owner told us that she would be willing to sell or rent, whatever worked out for us.

we decided rather quickly that we should commit to at least renting the building, and then figure out if we could possibly purchase the building later. so, we cobbled some money together and signed a lease that provided us the entire summer to renovate without paying rent.

you can see some before and after photos at the world fare site.

now we were back to the money question again. we had committed to a space, but we still had no idea how we were going to pay for the renovations, the initial merchandise or any other expenses. we figured we had to raise about $25,000 to make this whole thing work.

Posted by Rob Vander Giessen-Reitsma at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

our original idea for this entire venture revolved around two connected storefronts which were selling for an insanely cheap price (something like $60,000 for over 5,000 square feet of retail space--not to mention the second floor). we had plans to open a fair trade store in one storefront and a fair trade coffee house in the other.

we met with several influential people in the community, including the mayor (the owner of the book store), to test the feasibility of our ideas. after many discussions with many people, we came to the conclusion that three rivers was a community that was ready for this kind of a retail operation. we also quickly realized that attempting to open both operations at once was not going to be possible (or wise) and that the original property we had looked into was not going to work.

the entire time we were researching this project, we were working under the assumption that we would purchase the building in which the store would operate. we looked at every building on the market for several months and decided on one with unique character (it featured a walk-through that went underneath the building to the other side) and a manageable amount of space (about 800 square feet).

now, we just had to figure out how we, people with very little financial resources, were going to be able to make this work.

Posted by Rob Vander Giessen-Reitsma at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

kirstin and i moved to three rivers, michigan, at the end of last year because we could no longer financially able to pay rent and because we were hoping to focus more on *cino-related activities. kirstin's grandparents were kind enough to allow us to move to their summer lake cottage for a temporary, rent-free home.

we were only supposed to stay for about six months, but, after exploring three rivers, we've decided to stay indefinitely. in fact, we started the store and i've gone back to school (goshen college), so we'll be here for a while.

why did we decide to start the store?

well, here goes . . .

the first time we walked into our present church home, st. john's lutheran, we noticed they were serving fair trade coffee and tea. so we knew there would be people with shared values in the church.

and there were. we met jeff keefer and brianne donaldson (who are married) during that first visit and connected immediately. they have since become amazing friends. they were trying to convince us to stay in three rivers from the day they met us. once bri found out that kirstin had worked in a fair trade store, she encouraged us (strongly) to start a store here.

so we figured we would explore the idea to see if it would even be a possibility.

to be continued . . . (i don't suppose i need to say that, since this is a blog and you expect that out of me)

Posted by Rob Vander Giessen-Reitsma at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

we've been having a number of good days since we opened the store on august 31. for example, today we've sold over $270 in merchandise. i know that's a good day, of course, but i didn't fully realize how good.

kirstin explained that the fair trade store she worked in previously rarely had days where sales neared $300. in fact, days like that were regarded as quite remarkable there.

so that's pretty cool. it must mean the community supports the cause of the store, or at least the cause of purchasing cool things for their homes.

Posted by Rob Vander Giessen-Reitsma at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)