ASU in the Community - Fair Trade Ventrues

Fair Trade Ventures

Roundtable Participants:

Catherine Traywick founder of Women Beyond Borders, creative writing student and feature writer in the Office of University Initiatives at Arizona State University’s Tempe campus.
Yolanda Serrano-Gehman, 2007 recipient of Entrepreneur Advantage Project (EAP) grant for Nahui Ventures and graduate student in Global Technology Development at ASU’s Polytechnic campus.
Dr. Julie Murphy Erfani, associate professor of politics and interdisciplinary social science in the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at ASU’s West campus.

“At this point in my career, I want to … demonstrate that it’s possible… to link people transnationally in such a way that market forces would facilitate a living wage. It’s a dreamer-type thing. It’s transnationally community embedded.” - Julie Murphy Erfani, associate professor of politics and interdisciplinary social science at ASU

As a feature writer for the Community Camera, I have the opportunity to connect with a variety of individuals engaged in socially embedded work, from dedicated students and faculty to inspired community members, all forging mutually beneficial partnerships linking campus and community. As a student organizer, these connections have time and again proven invaluable to my own socially embedded work with Women Beyond Borders –a student group that organizes locally to address issues of violence, poverty, education and health among women globally.

In an effort to raise awareness of other ASU-based ventures that demonstrate the far reach of social embeddedness on our campuses -- as well as to create some meaningful partnerships -- I arranged a roundtable discussion with two other individuals who are engaged in similarly focused projects.

I met with Yolanda Serrano-Gehman, a graduate student at the Polytechnic campus who last year received an Entrepreneur Advantage Project grant for an indigenous women’s handicraft cooperative that she organized in Puebla, Mexico. I also met with Dr. Julie Murphy Erfani, associate professor of politics and interdisciplinary social science at ASU’s West campus, whose interest and expertise in fair trade has led her to work with indigenous women artisans in Oaxaca, Mexico.

CT: Thank you for coming today. I wanted to organize this roundtable because I see that we’re all doing related work, and I thought it would be beneficial for us to connect, and share with each other what we’re doing.

I should tell you a little bit about my interest in this subject. I work with a women’s group on campus called Women Beyond Borders.We work with a couple of groups in Mexico, one of which is a community organization in Juarez called ALDEA that has started up a handicraft center in their community, but they really lack the resources and education necessary to make it work, so we’re thinking of applying for an EAP grant to help them get it up and running and make it sustainable.

Yolanda, I know that you received an EAP grant last year for your work with a handicraft cooperative in Puebla. Can you tell us a little bit about your work?

YSG: Yes, this project started while I was in Mexico participating on a Fulbright program. I visited a small indigenous village in the state of Puebla. I began conducting educational workshops for the indigenous women to help them to improve their handicraft skills with the purpose of increase their sales. Later, I learned about an opportunity here [at ASU], the Entrepreneurial Advantage Project, to apply for a grant. My project was about conducting a marketing research; EAP is looking to support entrepreneur projects. Even though my project is not just focused on economic development, I did focus on that aspect.

“How can you help those people become sustainable and generate income?” That was my case for the EAP marketing research. Of course, marketing research implies approaching businesses, talking to people, and participating in events whenever there’s an opportunity, and to begin talking about forming a cooperative with the people.

CT: So you helped them form the cooperative?

YSG: Yes, I had to help them form it. They pretty much work by helping each other, but I thought they could benefit more from getting organized. I talked to them about how they have to be committed, and that a cooperative is the way to go to handle volume, to be able to negotiate. The main thing is that the people are willing to work with you, and that you respond to their needs. It’s not my own agenda.

CT: What kind of workshops were you conducting?

YSG: More than anything, about marketing, about the benefits of a cooperative. Also, sustainable technology – improved cooking stoves, passive design. My vision is not just to help them sell their handicrafts, but for them to use this as a foundation to start bigger projects – [The cooperative] is not the ultimate goal. The next step is really becoming a sustainable community.

JME: What kind of products do they make?

YSG: They do blouses, different forms of tablecloths, what they call napkins. I’m a really strong opponent of changing the products that mean a lot in their traditions, because they are part of their heart, I would say.

JME: It’s pretty interesting and encouraging for me to know that other people are interested in these kinds of things. Sometimes I think I’m a little crazy.

I teach courses on fair trade and free trade in Latin America and North America. I’ve been aware for a long time that there are a lot of groups that are not really equipped to reach the NorthAmerican market with products, especially artisan products. And they tend to be women, and they tend to be artisan producers, working in pretty isolated rural villages in the state of Oaxaca.

CT: Will you tell us a little bit about your work with cooperatives in Oaxaca?

JME: Well, we want to get a grant from a private foundation to fund the construction of a fair trade network to link direct producers of artisan products in Oaxaca to some private sector businesses in the state of Sonora, to some migrant vendors in Puerto Penasco, and some wholesale and retail fair trade shops in Phoenix.

CT: Why did you choose Oaxaca?

JME: I chose Oaxaca for a variety reasons, partly because it’s known for world-class artisan products that are not altogether well marketed. A lot of women artisan producers in Oaxaca have world class products that they are not willing to change at all, to service a market, because it would undermine the artistic quality and the cultural heritage as embodied in the product.

YSG: So are you actually working with them and you organize them?

JME: Well, actually, given the way I look, I’m not really an “insider” in Oaxaca. (Laughs) I’m not the direct contact, or only contact to find these direct producers. Instead, I have identified direct producers through two forms: a local indigenous contact I have in Oaxaca who’s kind of an activist and academic, and this woman anthropologist who knows a variety of direct producers and works with them.

YSG: I can see there are some fundamental differences between your approach and my approach.

JME: It’s a different kind of a project. Mine is about commerce really, and the micro-credit to help facilitate it, as well as the network that would facilitate it.

YSG: So the producers are producing and what you have done is identify these people and try to link them and open their market.

JME: That’s right. It’s different from your context, perhaps.

(To Catherine) And what are you trying to do in Juarez?

CT: Well, the group that we work with is a community organization in one of the poorest colonias in the city. They created the group because they wanted to improve living conditions in their community, and one way that they thought of doing that was to create a handicraft center so that the women who have children and can’t leave the community to work would be able to make a living.

We met them when we were visiting the city last September and found that they were facing a lot of challenges in trying to get it going because, first of all, they don’t have the start-up funds to buy the equipment and materials necessary. But also, the only people they’re selling the products to are people in their own community, who may not be in a position to buy them.

JME:-- And the community becomes saturated with the same kind of products.

YSG: Yes, that’s what happens. That’s what it is.

CT: But there’s also a little bit of a communication problem, too, because they don’t have easy access to internet or phone.

JME: Well there is an infrastructure problem, that’s right. It doesn’t take that many start up funds to give them community-based internet access. It would make a world of difference in terms of how they interface with the people selling their products.
What kind of products do they sell? Make?

CT: A lot of the products they sell are catered to children – toys, things like that. They make some aprons, some decorative things, but they don’t market it outside of their colonia, or in the city, or anywhere else. Initially we were going to propose that we sell ALDEA’s products here, to help them make a profit, but a lot of their products aren’t really saleable here. And we don’t want to go in and say “These are products that will sell –so make these products.” We‘re trying to figure out how to work with what they already have and what they already want to make, and sort of come up with ways they can market it outside of their own community.

JME: I’m sympathetic to what you say about having a hard time marketing here what they produce there. It’s…an issue. Breaking out of that local, saturated market is part of the objective. And using cross-border trade and networks of people is part of the answer at the grassroots level, but it’s not an easy thing to do.

If you can make an intervention through local people, who are their own indigenous instructors, that would diversify the products and still jive with what their cultural heritage would wish to do, that would help a lot.

YSG: [These communities] have similar problems, but the approach is different. The community is different.

One of the things that you should be aware of … is education. Education is very important. It’s more than the act of providing technical expertise; it also has to be about awareness. They need to be aware of the external factors, the external agents, they will face. As they are more exposed to people who want to help them, they are also more exposed to exploitation. Cooperatives serve as an educational transmitter -- to teach them about marketing, to teach them about how to handle conflict and resolution -- how to negotiate the product with people directly.

JME: Well this is the idea behind fair trade. That you link the direct producer directly to a retail outlet so there aren’t middlemen taking cut after cut after cut.

The idea is that there is a growing body of people and organizations that are part of fair trade, and you link into that and you work toward getting certification for this portfolio of products as fair trade products. And as soon as they do, that gives them not only a cache in the market but also potentially gives them links to already existing retail establishments that are interested in that – and consumers that look for that.

CT: Julie, you organize a study abroad program in Oaxaca on fair trade, right?

JME: Yes. It’s focused on artisan production, indigenous cultures, and fair trade organizations. The first objective is to educate the students in the local context. The second is to introduce them, through that education, to grassroots social entrepreneurship and to demonstrate to them that these social entrepreneurship activities have proven very successful. The third aspect is to so intrigue them about the possibilities of this kind of network as, not a solution to poverty, but as one of several creative mechanisms by which market forces can be channeled to produce sustainability in terms of living wages for the producers, living wages for the vendors -- bringing up parts of the Mexican economy.

[The long term goal] is to pique their interest in the possibilities of a different, alternative set of market operations that have an ethical foundation, in terms of producing sustainability. And I think they do get that.

CT: Why are you interested in this work?

JME: At this point in my career, I want to actually, on a very small scale, demonstrate that it’s possible, on very grassroots level, to link people transnationally in such a way that market forces would facilitate a living wage. It’s a dreamer-type thing. It’s transnationally community embedded.

CT: How do you think ASU benefits from all of this?

YSG: I believe ASU practices what it preaches, about social embeddedness. Our projects are affiliated with ASU, and every time we talk about our projects, we’re also talking about ASU. I feel that we all have the same kind of passion here, the same kind of objectives.

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