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Brandywine’s Fair Trade Year in Review 2020-21!

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What a challenging year it has been! Despite the pandemic, Penn State Brandywine’s Fair Trade subcommittee continued our efforts to maintain the Fair Trade status of our university, and to raise awareness and educate students, faculty, staff, and community about Fair Trade. While some on-campus events were canceled, we were able to continue our campaign in different ways by adding more resources online, holding virtual events and joining forces with other clubs once on-campus events were possible.

This year Fair Trade sub-committee moved into the newly formed Chancellor’s Commission on Sustainability. Dr. Mark Boudreau and Dr. Julie Stanton were faculty co-chairs, and Vippy Yee, Dr. Marina Skyers, Dr. Lynn Hartle, and Prof. Zoia Pavlovskaia were members of the Fair Trade sub-committee.

We missed engaging with everyone in-person, but it gave us room to work on projects we wouldn’t otherwise. For example, we worked to create the Fair Trade library guide https://guides.libraries.psu.edu/FairTrade and the Fair Trade webpage for the PSU Brandywine website https://www.brandywine.psu.edu/fair-trade that will be great ongoing resources for future generations of students and scholars. We also worked to update our Fair Trade blog during the Fall 2020 semester which is now hosted on the PSU website https://sites.psu.edu/fairtrade/.

We learned about the importance of flexibility and we tried different ways to engage with students by holding both virtual and in-person events. During Spring 2021 semester, we co-hosted “Fair Trade Chocolate is More Loveful: Ben Conard, Five North, and Valentine’s Day,” which was a Zoom guest speaker event with Media Fair Trade on Wednesday, February 10, 2021. We also participated in the kickoff on campus event for the annual Social Justice week on Monday, April 12, 2021. Attendees had an opportunity to learn more about social justice and Fair Trade while sampling some Fair Trade mini chocolates and snacks.

Prof. Pavlovskaia and Penn State Brandywine students at the kickoff event for the annual Social Justice week on Monday, April 12, 2021

Prof. Pavlovskaia and Penn State Brandywine students at the kickoff event for the annual Social Justice week on Monday, April 12, 2021

 

We as a community—staff, faculty, and students—should be embracing Fair Trade more because it aligns with both the strategic development goals of our university and the sustainable development goals (SDGs) of the United Nations. FT is a movement to help the farmers and workers in developing countries to get paid fairly and have access to the resources (i.e., compensation, credit, technical assistance etc.) needed to provide sustainable production (World Fair Trade Organization, 2020). Consumers around the world can support the movement by purchasing FT certified products, which confirm that products meet ethical principles and environmental standards that are set in accordance with the requirements.

Classes are scheduled to resume in-person in the Fall 2021, and we are looking forward to the next academic year. In the next year, students can attend events, look for and buy FT items in the bookstore and cafeteria, and are invited to talk to Prof. Zoia Pavlovskaia if they would like to learn more and start a student club on campus.

2019-20: Fair Trade Year in Review

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WE ARE Fair Trade campus! Penn State Brandywine has been a Fair Trade university since 2012 and WE ARE still working strong to support Fair Trade. It’s been several years since this website was last updated, and here is a recap of Fair Trade activities that happened during the 2019-2020 academic year.

Fair Trade has a special importance at Penn State Brandywine. First, our university is located in Media, PA, the first Fair Trade town in the United States. Second, Penn State Brandywine is the first and only Fair Trade University campus in the Penn State system.

Currently, Fair Trade is part of the Sustainability Committee on campus. This 2019-2020 year Dr. Mark Boudreau was the chair of the Sustainability Committee, and Dr. Samantha Pezzimenti and myself, Prof. Zoia Pavlovskaia, were members of the Fair Trade sub-committee.

I, Professor Pavlovskaia, joined Penn State Brandywine as a Lecturer in Business in August 2019 and I am a new Fair Trade representative for our university. I first learned about Fair Trade as an undergraduate student by traveling to El Salvador many years ago, and I have carried my passion through the years to now teach students about it. I am also involved locally with the Media Fair Trade Committee which recently featured Penn State Brandywine’s Fair Trade story in a blog post on their website.

To keep a Fair Trade designation, our university is required to host at least two Fair Trade events per semester. In Fall 2019, we hosted our annual Fair Trade banana and chocolate chip pancake breakfast, had a Fair Trade speaker presentation, and were part of the Destress Fest during finals week. In Spring 2020, we had a Fair Trade table at the MLK event and the Valentine’s Day event where students signed cards for farmers in Ecuador. All events were open to everyone on campus. For majority of events we partnered with other clubs and organizations on campus such as MarComm Club, BEAST, cafeteria, and the campus library. The Spring 2020 semester was interrupted with the COVID-19 virus and no events were hosted during the second half of the semester when classes were held online.

In addition to events, we distributed “For A Better World” free publication around campus; developed Fair Trade signs for the drinks cooler in the cafeteria; displayed a large Fair Trade banners around campus to educate about Fair Trade during the Fair Trade month of October 2019; participated in the Equal Exchange Fundraiser and in Virtual 2020 National Conference; and, lastly, we had  Elizabeth Killough of Media Fair Trade as our Fall 2019 commencement speaker.

We are looking forward to next year to host some annual events and new ones!

From HuffPost – Beyond Volunteering: Civic Engagement in Action

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If you have not had a chance yet to read this article, I strongly encourage you to do so.  It is written by Dr. John Anderson, President of Alfred State, titled Beyond Volunteering: Civic Engagement in Action.

You might already be wondering what this post has to do with Fair Trade – and I’ll get to that.  But let’s start with Dr. Anderson’s discussion of volunteering versus civic engagement, terminology that is easily confused by students, faculty, and the general public.  I have always told students that volunteering is usually a “one and done” service event, where only a band-aid fix is applied to a problem – for example, a canned food drive.  Now volunteering is certainly important.  We NEED to have food drives to help the food insecure in our region, but a food drive does not help address or make progress in solving the issue of hunger or eliminating the need for these collection drives.  This is where I tell students civic engagement comes in, using the content knowledge and skill sets we’re learning in college and applying them to real-world situations to find sustainable solutions to local-to-international challenges.

And Dr. Anderson does a great job addressing the differences between volunteering and civic engagement.  He relates volunteering to the term “what” – what are the problems?  What can be done?  But to get to civic engagement, that’s where the “why” and “how” comes in – why does this circumstance exist?  Why is there a need?  How can action be taken to change the current situation?  How can a solution be put into place?

Students involved in Fair Trade University campaigns across the United States (and the globe!) play a strong role in civic engagement on their campuses.  These students are leading events on campus, online, and in the community.  Students are helping others make informed purchases of Fair Trade products from food to clothing to athletic equipment.  Through events such as Alta Gracia t-shirt swaps (our what and how) and Fair Trade s’mores (our what and how) to the upcoming Going Bananas for Fair Trade event (being organized by an entire course on campus), my own Penn State Brandywine students are learning that education and awareness can lead to advocacy and the change they want to see.

Imagine how much further we could move the Fair Trade movement with even more civic engagement on college campuses.  Thank you, Dr. Anderson, for reminding us that we need to continue to ask “why.”

Contributed by Dr. Laura Guertin