Hello everyone! My name is Louie Donaghue, Penn State Brandywine’s Fair Trade Intern for the fall semester. I am a Letters, Arts & Science (LAS) major in my senior year with a minor in Environmental Inquiry. I will be regularly updating the blog posts and organizing events with Dr. Guertin. I want to thank Sarah DeMartino for starting off the Fair Trade Intern program so well and I am excited to pick up where she left off.

My first blog post is going to focus on an outcome from the 2012 Fairly Educated Conference held in Australia. At the conference, Fairly Educated announced the start of a new campaign to have every college campus in Australia and New Zealand reach Fair Trade status by the end of 2015. The first step in the Fairly Educated plan was to launch a petition asking Australasian Campuses Towards Sustainability and the Tertiary Access Group, the two most influential education groups in the area, to give them full support in their mission. Here is a link to the petition http://www.change.org/everyuni.

Is Fairly Educated’s plan possible or too ambitious? I think that Fairly Educated’s plan is very ambitious and improbable, but it’s exactly what the Fair Trade movement needs right now. One of the bigger challenges that Fair Trade faces is that not enough people support it. Even if Fairly Educated fails to reach their goal and they only get half of the campuses on board, this campaign will still be a success.

If Fairly Educated does succeed would that mean something like this would be possible in America? Maybe one day, but definitely not in the next three years.

http://www.change.org/everyuni

http://fairlyeducated.com/mediarelease

–Contributed by Louis Donaghue, Fair Trade Intern