Make your Valentine's Day sweet and fair this year!  

For this Valentine’s day, AID wants to help you launch a campaign to get Fair Trade products on campus.  We are offering $50 mini-grants to students who want to buy Fair Trade flowers or chocolate to distribute on their campuses for February 14.

Each Valentine’s Day, we give chocolate and flowers to someone in our lives in order to let them know that we care for them, that we are thinking of them. Unfortunately, this thoughtful and noble gesture often comes at the expense of those who produced the sweet or fragrant gift. Americans spend $13 Billion a year on chocolate, and yet, child labor, poverty-level wages, and environmental degradation are-all-too common features of the cocoa and flower industries: According to the International Labor Rights Fund, “The US Department of State estimates that more than 109,000 children in Cote d’Ivoire’s cocoa industry work under ‘the worst forms of child labor,’ and that some 10,000 are victims of human trafficking or enslavement.”  Pervasive gender abuse exists in the flower industry.  For example, more than 55 percent of the flower workers in northern Ecuador have been subjected to some form of sexual harassment, and forced pregnancy tests and sexual abuse are commonplace.

Fair Trade products provide an alternative to those produced in exploitative or abusive conditions.  They are goods that are produced by well-treated workers who receive a fair wage, and they are manufactured employing stewardship practices that protect, rather than harm, the environment. They are an excellent and simple way to begin constructing a more humane and just international trading system.

For this Valentine’s day, AID wants to help you launch a campaign to get Fair Trade products on campus.  We are offering $50 mini-grants to students who want to buy Fair Trade flowers or chocolate to distribute on their campuses for February 14.  In addition to raising awareness, this is a great opportunity to launch a Fair Trade campaign on your campus.  Come join students around the country who are organizing to make sure that their university purchases and provides Fair Trade products on campus, and in the process, protects men, women, children, and the environment!

In addition to the mini-grant, we have developed a one page fact sheet that you can hand out with the delectable or aromatic treat.  Click here to download a one page fact sheet that:

• Explains the importance of Fair Trade products.
• Allows you to introduce and explain your campaign.  You will be able to tailor the document to explain your campaign.

Finally, AID has a number of other resources available to students to launch a Fair Trade campaign, such films screenings.  Check out the film “Black Gold” at www.aidemocracy.org/films.php

In order to register to recieve the mini-grant to buy Fair Trade Flowers of Chocolate, please click here, or contact sam@aidemocracy.org

You can find Fair Trade flowers by clicking here, and Fair Trade chocolate by clicking here.

Click here to download the one page factsheet.