Fair Trade Fund

Help People Help Themselves

Increase the impact of your purchase. For every purchase you make from CRS partners, a percentage is donated back to the CRS Fair Trade Fund. CRS invests this money into projects overseas to strengthen worker cooperatives, their products, and access to markets.

Current grantees:

Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation: CRS together with our partners Serrv and Ten Thousand Villages contributed $24,900 towards the complete renovation of 6 olive wood workshops in the Holy Land, benefiting 225 workers and their communities. Workshops were transformed from un-safe, un-healthy work spaces to beautiful work spaces with proper ventilation, lighting, and safety equipment. The one-of-a-kind olive wood nativities and mother of pearl crosses are just some of the products these artisans produce and now they are producing them under much better conditions!

• CRS Parish Ambassador Corps: The CRS Fair Trade Fund supports our Parish Ambassador Corps by providing training and resources to our Parish Ambassador volunteers who bring the mission of global solidarity to their respective parishes and dioceses.
• CRS Carbon Credit Feasibility Study: CRS Fair Trade together with our Latin American program contributed 6,000 to conduct a feasibility study to determine the potential for marketing certified carbon credits to Catholic institutions, businesses, and individuals from our agriculture programs in Guatemala and Nicaragua.
• Sindyanna of Galilee: The fund contributed 5,000 to support the creation of a visitors center in Cana that would create a space for Jewish and Arab women to continue basket weaving classes as well as provide a space for marketing their new wares.
• Nepalese Artisan Workshops: Following the recent earthquakes in Nepal, the CRS Fair Trade Fund contributed $10,500 towards the rebuilding of two artisan workshops that suffered extensive damage: Annapurna Producers’ Jewelry and the Lubhu Weaving Producers.

Former grantees:

Adel Fair Trade is a non-governmental organization that CRS helped establish in Palestine. Its mission includes helping vulnerable women and disadvantaged farmers produce healthy products such as goat cheese and lemonade, while offering a fair price. The Adel project received $100,00o in support over two years and is now a self sufficient fair trade business supporting it’s workers from the money generated from product sales.

Learn more about fair trade and ethical purchasing

• Fair Prices

• Jesus lived in Nazareth as a carpenter’s son, working with Joseph to earn a living wage for his labor. This wage would have factored in the costs of the materials and allowed Jesus to cover the basic needs of his family: food, clothing, shelter. Today’s laborers, artisans and farmers, however, often do not receive payment that is just and fair. The guarantee of a fair price is particularly important for commodities like coffee, cocoa and bananas, which have been marked by persistent volatility. The prices for these products on conventional markets often rise and fall quickly. Fair Trade’s commitment to paying a fair price for these commodities means that small-scale farmers are guaranteed a fair wage, regardless of what is happening in the market. Plus, the fair prices paid for Fair Trade products not only increase family incomes but also allow communities to invest in infrastructure such as sanitation facilities and health clinics. The commitment of Fair Traders to pay producers a fair wage is the bedrock principle of Fair Trade.

• Safe Working Conditions

• Jesus and Joseph likely worked long and hard. But they took breaks when they needed them. They had access to clean water and air to restore their bodies throughout the day, unlike some of today’s workplaces that we now call sweatshops. Another criterion of Fair Trade, then, is healthy and safe working conditions.

• Cooperative Workplaces

• Joseph was a carpenter, so Jesus trained to be one, too, working with others in the family and in association with other carpenters. Today, Fair Trade supports cooperatives—democratically run organizations that promote the active participation of their members and equal opportunity for all. Fair Trade organizations purchase directly from cooperatives in developing countries and market their products to consumers.

• Credit and Technical Assistance

• Conventional trade does not naturally foster the development of small-scale producers overseas. Fair Trade helps to fill this critical gap through technical assistance and credit. Through training and consultation, Fair Trade organizations help producers gain the market knowledge they need to produce overseas handcrafts and food that appeal to consumer tastes and trends here in the United States. Perhaps more importantly, Fair Trade organizations also offer credit on fair terms. Most small-scale farmers and artisans overseas are forced to borrow at exorbitant rates from informal money lenders in their communities. When they are unable to repay the interest, they enter a vicious cycle of debt from which it is difficult to escape. Fair Trade provides them with affordable access to the credit they need to make their farm and craft cooperatives successful enterprises.

• Environmental Stewardship

• We cannot know precisely how Jesus used the raw materials essential to his carpentry, but we know that our church and other faiths have drawn from a clear mandate to treat the earth and its abundance with reverence. Fair Trade production practices mirror this respect for God’s creation. The more farmers and artisans take care of the environments in which they operate, the more those environments will take care of them. Fair Trade encourages respect for creation with technical assistance that helps farmers and artisans meet the expectations of environmentally conscious consumers.

• Long-Term Relationships

• As an independent carpenter, Jesus would probably have had many commercial relationships. It’s likely also that as long as His customers paid Him fairly and He created quality products, there would have been incentives for both parties to maintain a long term relationship. Fair Trade is built on a firm foundation of stable, long-term, mutually beneficial trading relations between cooperatives of artisans and farmers and the Fair Trade organizations that buy the things they create. The Fair Trade organizations don’t change suppliers from one year to the next in search of lower prices; they work in partnership with the same producers year after year after year—and are still able to make a healthy profit.