Celebrating 30 Years of Fairtrade

As Fairtrade Fortnight draws to a close, I wanted to share some of the highlights from the Southern Membership & Community Council. Fairtrade is always an important event on the calendar as it is a great opportunity to educate both young and old on why the Co-op supports Fairtade and of course to try before you buy some of the wonderful products that we have in our stores.

Over the two weeks, we have had 90 little ones from Oundle Primary School visit our store to learn all about Fairtrade and following on from the sessions in store, the children were going back to school to look more closely at where some of their food comes from. We also delivered a Fairtrade workshop 25 little Beavers in Leicester and delivered a Fairtrade Assembly to over 320 students at Oxley Primary School in Shepshed. For the grown ups, we were a guest speaker at a Fairtrade Afternoon Tea in Melton Mowbray which was attended by over 60 members of the public, all enjoying cakes using fairtrade ingredients lovingly baked by volunteers of the Fairtrade Trading Post in the Town.

For our main event, we partnered with Co-op East Midlands and held a celebration event at our Insomnia Cafe, based in our Oakham Store and were delighted to welcome approximately 40 guests. We had interesting speakers, including Jane Avery, previous President at Central Co-op, who had visited Malawi and gave us first-hand experience on how Central Co-op's support for Malawi is really making a difference to farmers and producers. We also heard from Ian Baird-Smith from Shared Interest who talked about an Ethical Investment to Support Fairtrade and John Boyle from Revolver Co-op, which help to bring Fairtrade Tea and Coffee to the masses. We also welcomed local Fairtrade stalls and Fairtrade groups and it was great to see lots of networking and early Christmas presents being purchased. The event concluded with lunch and some Fairtrade wine tasting by our wonderful colleague and expert, Geoff.