Yesterday I mentioned Catholic Relief Services’ national and regional plans for World Fair Trade Day and encouraged you to get started on your own events.  Of course, we try to practice what we preach here at CRS Fair Trade! Here’s what we’ve cooked up:

Despite being a very multicultural organization, CRS Fair Trade is going to claim a little bit of USA pride.  Last year more than 12,000 Fair Traders in the United States set the World’s Record for Largest Fair Trade break.  Soon thereafter, however, about 50,000 residents of Finland took away the title!

This May, Fair Traders in the USA are going to try to win back from the good people of Finland the bragging rights for World’s Largest Fair Trade break.  Because CRS recently expanded our Raise Money Right project to include both Divine and Equal Exchange chocolate, we will be offering a chocolate break to our staff in Baltimore on the eve of the big day.

But Fair Trade isn’t free my friends…CRS employees will be challenged to win chocolate by scoring a goal using a Fair Trade Sports soccer ball.  With many employees from Africa and Latin America where soccer (or futbol) is very popular, we expect to be awarding lots of chocolate during our friendly competition in the CRS lunchroom (no worries, nothing is breakable up there on the 8th floor!)

Even if staff have no soccer skills, they’ll have a chance to buy chocolate as a fundraiser for the overseas work of Catholic Relief Services.  If you are looking for a simple, fun and effective way to take a Fair Trade break on or about May 9, please consider holding a Raise Money Right fundraiser in your community.  When you order organizing material from World Fair Trade Day organizers you’ll get a tally sheet to help keep count of how many participants you had, and when you order chocolate you’ll get all the details on how to use this fun global moment to raise money for worthy local causes.

To encourage our hard working staff to leave their desks for the break, Katy has agreed to dress up as a fish and parade through our LEED-certified building.  I will be pounding on a drum as Mary chants, “Beat the Fins, not just the drums!”   Get it? Fins? Finland? Silly? yes, we agree.  But in these tough economic times, which hit the poorest of the poor the hardest, we need to take time out to celebrate our successes, to spread our passion, and to remember “everything’s better when its fair.”

There’s plenty of free information on how to organize your own event.  Also several supporters of the day, such as CRS partners Peace Coffee and Divine Chocolate are providing incentives for planning an event.  So please join us!

Tags: Chocolate, Coffee, fair trade, fair trade sports

This entry was posted on Friday, March 27th, 2009 at 9:52 am and is filed under Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.