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Artist Collaboration: Brilliant Stranger
by Dawn Patel

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[/fusion_text][fusion_separator style_type=”none” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” sticky_display=”normal,sticky” class=”” id=”” flex_grow=”0″ top_margin=”20px” bottom_margin=”20px” width=”” alignment=”center” border_size=”” sep_color=”” hue=”” saturation=”” lightness=”” alpha=”” icon=”” icon_size=”” icon_color=”” icon_circle=”” icon_circle_color=”” /][fusion_text columns=”” column_min_width=”” column_spacing=”” rule_style=”” rule_size=”” rule_color=”” hue=”” saturation=”” lightness=”” alpha=”” content_alignment_medium=”” content_alignment_small=”” content_alignment=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” sticky_display=”normal,sticky” class=”” id=”” margin_top=”” margin_right=”” margin_bottom=”” margin_left=”” fusion_font_family_text_font=”” fusion_font_variant_text_font=”” font_size=”” line_height=”” letter_spacing=”” text_transform=”” text_color=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”left” animation_color=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_delay=”0″ animation_offset=”” logics=””]

Will Rogers once said, “A stranger is a friend I’ve never met.” These “friends I’ve never met” are the dedicated, hardworking, and talented collaborators in the Brilliant Stranger Line of Cotton Clothing. 

My relationship with Ganesh Himal Trading began in 2003, when I opened my first brick and mortar shop in the beautiful Lake Superior town of Bayfield, Wisconsin.  At the time I had just left an elementary art teaching job and dove into my life as a full time entrepreneur with the aims of ecological and social responsibility (as well as creativity) at the forefront of my business and life goals.  For this reason I decided to purchase Fair Trade goods, and that decision led me down a road that has changed my life.  While researching Fair Trade I quickly discovered Ganesh Himal Trading, a Fair Trade Federation member in Washington State.  Ganesh Himal Trading, founded in 1984, has been on the forefront of the Fair Trade Retail movement in the US.  It’s co-founders Denise Attwood and Ric Conner believe in positive and mutually beneficial relationships, a core principle of the Fair Trade movement.  I soon discovered this focus makes working with them feel like anything but business as usual.  Their steadfast dedication to principles such as partnership, co-creativity, fair wages, transparency and most of all friendship and respect has been an inspiration to me over the years. 

While in Bayfield I sold a variety of Ganesh Himal’s products, everything from handbags made from recycled tires to scarves made from vintage saris.  I always felt good about ordering from them, and after a few years of doing business together the phone call orders felt like checking in with old friends.  Our business relationship lasted over ten years and when I started producing my own line of clothing, reaching out to Ganesh Himal was my first (and it turns out only) choice.  It was a new direction for all of us, but we decided to do some trial pieces.  Over the next five years I went from making one of a kind pieces entirely on my own to seeing my designs and ideas come back from Nepal, as expertly tailored exquisite clothing made of hand woven cotton.  We work small scale and the process is very personal, with phone calls, emails, drawings, samples and even occasional family photo sharing!

I started experimenting with this collaborative relationship, which is always inspiring me to try new ideas and techniques.  With the initial garment making in the hands of master tailors and weavers, I have been able to work with natural and plant dyes, more and more highly developed methods of machine and hand stitching, painting and printmaking, with the clothing.  I have also been able to customize garments with unique finishing touches that enhance the fit for a wide range of sizes and body types, making fun and comfy clothing for many women, not just those who fit into a certain range of “normal.”  This expansion has made my clothing line unique in many ways, but most important to me, I can still work in a way that is both environmentally and socially conscious.  

Although I have not yet traveled to Nepal, the artisans who make my Brilliant Stranger Clothing have become a big part of my life, and I feel connected to them.  We share in the dignity and creative potential of working with our hands, producing clothing that people can wear knowing it has been made with careful, thoughtful consideration every step of the way.  I admire their skills as much as their serious work ethic, and I hope to meet them in the not too distant future!

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“The cacophony, the howling winds of humanity’s insane actions,  keeps us frenetic and reactive. The stillness makes us grounded and connective.”

By Denise Attwood

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Anyone who knows me knows I love whales. I have petted them, swum with them, walked the beach with them, had them come to comfort me when in deep sorrow and one grandmother whale gave me the gift of watching her die. I seek their wisdom wherever I am, even when I am far inland, because I believe their wisdom permeates and speaks to everything.

Their gifts to me have been many, but one of their most powerful lessons is how they deal with storms, they don’t beat against the wind or fight the waves, they just submerge into the beauty and stillness of the deep, where just a few feet below the tumult there is complete calm and they can dance.

We are living in a time of great chaos and tumult, so much going on like the perfect storm of humanity’s craziest attributes. The cacophony is so loud that it is like the winds of a hurricane howling such that we can’t hear ourselves think or each other speak. Amidst this storm, I recently lost one of my best friends, my almost 95-year-old father, and through the grace of grief, I have allowed myself to sink beneath the storm and find the quiet, calm steadiness of the waters beneath.

As I’ve danced beneath the waves, my heart has opened to the great sorrow of loss and the beauty of a well-lived life, but also to how we are so easily distracted from what is truly at stake in the world. The cacophony, the howling winds of humanity’s insane actions, keeps us frenetic and reactive; the stillness makes us grounded and connective.

It is to that connection that I return time and again. Whether it is with the whales, the spirit of my beautiful father or the day to day work that I do, I want to more deeply experience the connectivity and calm amidst the storm that rages above. I feel the power of that connectivity, and how it leads into places we can only go with vision together. Connectivity and relationship feels to me like hope. And hope is where I choose to dwell because it shows me what is possible.

In the spirit of connectivity and creating possibilities we at Ganesh Himal have ventured into yet another spirited and exciting relationship based on mutual respect and great love. You will read about it below in our story about Dawn Patel and her painting. Hopefully you feel it in everything we do.

As spring emerges, and hope and beauty explode, I invite you into the depths with us, into the place of calm possibility, that we may ride out these storms with great resolve so that we can recognize the connection that lies in it all. It is in the stillness that our intention can be the clearest and most powerful. So let’s dance below the surface, with great power, like the whales and co-create the world we long to live in.  That is the true heart of Fair Trade.

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What is the Impact of a Fair Trade Childhood?

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The first time I traveled to Nepal I was five months old. Since then I have returned over a dozen times, spending more than two cumulative years of my life there in total. Over these years, I saw something very special: a successful business built on relationships of trust and mutual respect that brought people together and treated them with dignity.

As a child, this experience contrasted harshly with the rest of the world I saw playing out around me: family and friends working multiple jobs to try and provide for their family, only to be laid off in the blink of an eye to protect the bottom line.

Inspired by my parents and what they had accomplished in partnership with producers in Nepal, I have built my career around emulating those same spaces of trust, respect, and dignity here in the United States. On this side of the globe, I do it through community organizing, a practice that relies on the same vision that people should have a say in the future of their communities rather than being at the disposal of corporate developers or far removed public officials.
As some of you may know, I am currently spending 12 months on a Watson Fellowship exploring how communities in England, Spain, Mongolia, and South Africa practice this work of Community Organizing. The questions at the heart of this journey will be: how do we meet people face-to-face and build relationships that create the capacity in a community for leadership development, citizen-led action and strong relationships across the lines that often divide us?

If you are interested in learning about the incredible and inspiring work being done by every-day people in communities around the world, I invite you to follow along on my blog. So far in Barcelona, we’ve covered 250+ person neighborhood dinners, community meetings taking place as part of the largest housing-rights movement in Western Europe, and the story of a neighborhood that took on industrial developers (and won!).

To subscribe, go here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc2pSWPV4C0skLhYc1fgsVmhpU9XTvZxwy2XS2BpI8u3RTaCQ/viewform
To check out the blog: https://www.cameronnorbuconner.com/blog
To learn more about the Watson Fellowship: https://www.cameronnorbuconner.com/the-watson-fellowship

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Perspectives

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Over the last month, two baby great horned owls have adopted our wooded home as their new home. I wake to them in the morning squawking in the bird bath or sitting on a post by my garden, their beautiful eyes piercing through me, their heads swiveling 360 degrees to take in their new world. These two have fledged and seem a bit lost without Mom but they are making their way.

Being able to watch them so closely has made me curious about sight, perspective, patience, and stealth. Their eyes penetrate, their vision is keen, they see from so many perspectives, they are patient to no end, and they fly in complete silence.

Here we sit in our world of Fair Trade, and I can’t help but find valuable lessons from my not-so-little companions. As fair traders, we are striking out on our own, fledging in a way, from a system of business as usual into a place of business as meaningful. We are finding our way in a world that is foreign and learning how we can thrive; we are experimenting with new wonders (is a bird bath big enough for two owls?) and seeking delight in learning that we might just be able to do things differently; we are visioning a new way of being in the world and quietly (or not so quietly) turning our eyes toward new pathways forward. We are learning that sticking with our companions makes sense, that community helps us to learn and grow and we are learning to be patient for new ideas to come to fruition. Isn’t it great to be like an owl!

It’s a time of great busyness and hopefully great business for all of us. In the chaos of it all I am always looking for new ways of seeing. The owls are teaching me how important that is, so is our son. Recently, Cameron, left for his year-long Watson Fellowship to explore ways of being in the world that allow people with little power access to the power they need to change their lives. My owl analogy doesn’t quite stretch this far, but I invite you all to check out his blog, it’s insight that is so relevant to fair trade and will tweak all of our imaginations by offering perspectives into what we may not be seeing as possible. His fellowship will take him from Barcelona to England to South Africa and Mongolia.

So I invite you as you enter this crazy time to sit with the wisdom of the owls and the new perspectives of youth. Take care of yourselves and each other, and keep dreaming in the world we all know is possible.

Namaste,
Denise & all at Ganesh Himal Trading

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Co-Owner Denise Attwood with Ms. Meera Bhattarai and Ms. Revita Shrestha

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Ganesh Himal Trading Makes a Second Contribution to ACP’s Retirement Fund

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In 2019 our long-time partner and friend, Meera Bhattarai, who is the founder and director of the Association for Craft Producers (ACP) in Nepal informed us of a truly perilous situation for ACP’s 800 women employees. Since founding ACP in 1984, Ms. Bhatterai has empowered thousands of low-income women in Nepal and helped them gain access to income, skills development, social benefits and training. ACP has always provided financial and employee benefits far beyond what the Nepali government requires. ACP gives employees fair wages, a voice in the decision making process, and economic control of their resources. As a result these employees have done amazing things for their children and their communities.

In 2019, ACP found itself in a crisis situation when the government of Nepal suddenly decided to impose timelines on retirement savings held by organizations. Here’s a bit of background. ACP has always provided a retirement benefit for employees which they gave them when they left the organization. Over the last 19 years, ACP has held aside and paid out these retirement benefits to all those who were leaving without any problem or delay. Early in the program, however, their financial advisors told them that as long as they had adequate funds to pay off those who were about to retire, they should invest the remaining retirement funds back into the organization. So, ACP held the amount needed for retirees in reserve and invested the rest back into their operations. Recognizing that their producers were aging, they increased their retirement reserves and in 2019 had set aside $89,722 US.

Here’s the problem. In 2019, the Nepali government passed a new labor law which made it mandatory to bank all retirement funds owed to workers on a monthly basis instead of at the end of their service. They also stipulated that ALL previous retirement fund liabilities collected must be deposited in a government approved fund. In accordance with that mandate, ACP committed to producers that all their previous retirement funds will be deposited in their government approved accounts by the end March of 2025.

Because ACP has been collecting retirement funds for such a long time, their retirement fund liability to producers in 2019 was $281,705 US of which they have been able tocollect and pay $230,705 US, leaving approximately $51,000 US to raise to cover all retirement accounts. Since the passage of the law in 2019, they have been able to stay current with paying into the retirement accounts monthly (even with Covid), so their retirement debt has not grown. However, they still have to raise the balance of $51,000 US before March of 2025. This, while they navigate business survival with decreased sales, in the aftermath of Covid, without PPP loans or any other government assistance.

ACP is a remarkable non-profit that has been financially self-sufficient from the sale of their goods since the fourth year of their operation. For 35+ years they have been reliant on their own income source for day-to-day operations while enabling thousands of low-income artisans, predominantly women, to have dignified lives and a stronger voice. Throughout their history, they have been responsible toward all of their stakeholders, instituting benefit programs long before the government ever even considered them. They understand that their employees are looking to them to honor the commitment to the producer retirement accounts, and they need to honor that by fully funding them. Currently, however, since the start of the pandemic, their profit has barely stretched to cover their overhead expenses, as well as keeping up with the current retirement benefits. Because of these pressures, which are compounded by the current global economy, it will be impossible for them to raise their profits enough to cover the additional $51,000 needed in the next year and a half. Attempting to do so has already put a huge strain on the organization. They do not want to fail, too much is at stake, and they are in absolute need of financial assistance to cover these retirement fund liabilities.

Ganesh Himal Trading has worked with ACP as a fair trade importer for over 35 years. We have watched them persevere through civil wars, earthquakes, embargos and the Covid pandemic without any help from the government. We’ve seen their effectiveness first hand and watched women thrive and transform their communities. ACP is in the work of women’s economic empowerment for the long haul and they have a proven track record.

ACP is the premier women’s craft organization for women’s economic empowerment and Fair Trade in Nepal and they serve as a model organization for others to follow. The impact of losing this organization would not only affect their producers but the future of all of their followers.

Recognizing the importance of ACP’s survival and the breadth of their monumental work, Ganesh Himal Trading made a $5,000 donation to their retirement fund in 2022 and recently made our second donation of $5,000 for 2023. At this point this is all we can do but our plan is to continue helping into the future. That is why we are writing to you. ACP is humbly asking for your support at this critical time.

If an individual or business would like to contribute to this incredible organization’s retirement fund in their time of need, please reach out to us at info@ganeshhimaltrading.com for more information. The return on this investment is huge, and will ensure the continuation of a critical, 35+ year old nonprofit in Nepal that provides fair wage jobs for 800 women, continued stability for their families, and much needed retirement funds in a country that does not offer any social security or safety net for old age.

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2022 Conscious Connections Annual Report

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Dear Friends of CCF,

In 2022, we rejoiced the fact that we could come together again, to hug, to laugh, and to share conversation in person. We celebrated the metamorphosis of our oldest project, the Baseri Clinic, and the successful culmination of one of our biggest endeavors to date: the Girl’s Education Endowment. We commemorated new relationships that emerged out of the pandemic with leaders like Nilam Poudel, Ching Lhomi from the Lhomi Community and the women from Drokpo Nepal!

In this year’s Annual Report, you will read about what you have helped make possible. My hope is that you too will take a moment to rejoice and celebrate with us.

It was 15 years ago that CCF founders & our Nepali partners had a dream to build a health care clinic in Baseri, a remote village in Nepal – a place where no clinic existed and primary health care was badly needed. That clinic opened its doors in 2010 and was rebuilt after the 2015 earthquake. Since the clinic’s inception, it has been vital to the health care of the Baseri area and funded largely by CCF. Now, in 2022, we started the transition to have the government and community take over the clinic’s operations completely. This will allow the clinic to expand and remain long after CCF is gone. The Baseri community understands how valuable this clinic is and they know they want it to be there to serve them for generations.

It was 11 years ago that CCF founders & our Nepali partners had a dream to provide an endowment for a popular and successful educational stipend program that allowed marginalized girls to stay in school. By 2021 CCF had raised enough money for the leaders at ACP to feel secure in the future of the program. Now, in 2022 and onward, The interest alone from the endowment will ensure the stipends are paid. CCF will now just raise small yearly grants to help expand the program to allow for more years of schooling in the future. This program is stable now and will ensure that many girls and children who otherwise would have gone without education will now have one.

Relational work means investing in each other, not providing charity. The beauty of the Baseri Clinic and the Girls Education Endowment is that neither would have been possible without CCF, yet both have grown to the extent where our support is no longer needed. It means we are making true, lasting change – not just treading water. I am so proud of what we have accomplished.

We are thrilled that these programs are transitioning out of CCF’s direct sphere and into being completely Nepali run. These transitions reflect CCF’s core belief that supporting collaborative efforts that invest in and empower local communities, increase the ability of women and girls to thrive as key participants in their society, allow local and trusted leaders to take charge of the programs’ futures are the most sustainable activities and the ones that in 20 years will be shown to have had the greatest impact. It has always been one of our goals to facilitate programs that will thrive far into the future without CCF and with trusted Nepali leadership and skills. We invite you to continue on this amazing journey with us as we continue to identify and partner with local leaders who will transform, educate, and empower their own communities. We’re excited to let go of the reins of some and with your help, take on the challenges of those to come.

Namaste,

Denise Attwood CCF Board Chair

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Thank You!

As I begin to write this I am sitting beside the beautiful spring on our land that I have come to know as Inchylala. She has been my constant companion over the years and has been my eyes and connection to the waters of the world and the songs of the whales that I so dearly love but don’t often get to see. But there’s more.  She connects me to every other droplet of water on this beautiful planet and so connects me to the mountain rivers, each tree with sap running in their veins, each plant and animal and yes to all of humanity as well. The water of this small spring connects me to the world and this beautiful planet creating a web of interconnection with every being and weaving us all together.

What does this have to do with you all and fair trade? As we wind our way through another holiday season and close yet another year of fair trade sales we too are weaving and strengthening another fabric that wraps its loving arms around this beautiful planet.  Just as my spring connects me to every living being on this planet, each of you in fair trade connect me to so many others and to the beauty of humanity. Through our mutual care of each other, the loving relationships formed, the birthing of doing business in a different way , and seeing justice through trade as a viable pathway, we create a new way of doing trade together that benefits all living beings.

You may be exhausted at this time, but from Ganesh Himal we want to extend our greatest thanks for bringing the fair trade message to all who you have touched this past year. Each touch is a droplet, a seed planted. Thank you for your care and understanding of the value of these interconnecting relationships that we are forming and for your awareness of how trade with justice can be a positive force for change. The weaving grows stronger with each passing year and each of your threads plays a vital role.

Just as all the waters are connected and create and sustain life, we too are connected and cannot do any of this on our own. Read below about all that you have enabled us at Ganesh Himal to do and understand the power that we have together. We hope you can take time soon and rest and rejuvenate. Dream of sitting beside a beautiful spring with the sun warming your back,  fill your heart with the strength and connection they have to offer and we will begin again together in the New Year. Happy holidays and thank you for all of your amazing support.

Namaste,

Denise

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