Ganesh Himal Trading

Category: Fair Trade News

  • The 2023 Festival of Fair Trade

    The 2023 Festival of Fair Trade

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    Join us for the 2023 Festival of Fair Trade!

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  • Artisan Spotlight

    Artisan Spotlight

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    Sadle Traders &  Ram Bahadur

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    The Ganesh Himal Trading tailors create a beautiful array of men’s and women’s clothing, bags and headbands. Mostly made from handwoven cotton fabric, the tailors partner with many local weavers to produce some of the highest quality handmade clothing. In addition to handwoven fabrics, they also incorporate recycled and sustainable materials including hemp, recycled rubber, no kill leather, recycled saris and wool.

    Ram Bahadur’s Story

    Ram Bahadur was born in Chitwan (which is 140 km away from Kathmandu) and he now lives near Thamal in Kathmandu. He has a family of 5, 1 son and 4 daughters who are now all grown. Ram Bahadur is a pattern master and fabric cutting master, but can also act as a tailor if he is called to. Tailoring has been in Rams family for more then 4 centuries. He first began to tailor when he was 15 years old and learned from his father. In turn he has taught this trade to his son and his daughters. Being able to work at Sadle has given him the ability to buy a nice piece of land and build a fair ­sized house on it. It has also enabled him to send his children to school . In the future he wants to continue to work here at Sadle until he retires. When he retires he wants to live with his family and play with and help take care of his grandchildren. Ganesh Himal Trading has worked with Ram for over 27 years!

    Read more here>

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  • Succession in Action, Part 2

    Succession in Action, Part 2

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    Co-Owner, Denise Attwood
    Namaste! Candi Horton and Brian Schmucker of what was formerly Baksheesh Fair Trade are fair trade retail pioneers writ large. If you’ve been involved in Fair Trade you have most likely felt their influence and benefitted greatly from their mentoring and small business advice. Even now, as they transition out of owning their Fair Trade stores they continue to help by shining a light on ways to keep the stores they so consciously created alive.
     
     
     
    Here, we carry on our conversation about how to intentionally plan for the transition of fair trade businesses to the next generation. In doing so we hope to help build and strengthen the future of Fair Trade by helping fair traders keep the vision of their stores and businesses alive long after they have stopped being their owners. We also hope to create a platform for an open and fruitful dialog around the successes, failures and near misses of those who are or have transitioned their Fair Trade businesses.
     
     
     
    We are all leaders and learners in understanding how to keep these visions alive so hearing from our community hopefully will serve us all well. We hope these conversations will spark something within you to begin thinking of how you can transition your fair trade business in the future. Your community, the artisans and some young energetic visionary you mentor will be so grateful to you if take the time now to create that pathway.
     
    We would love your insight, stories and comments as we continue this conversation.
     
     
     
    On another note, we are really excited to announce the launching of Conscious Connections Foundation’s new website and the completion of CCF’s 2018 Annual report. This added layer of removing barriers to women and girls in Nepal is meeting with great success. Enjoy!
     
     
     
    Namaste,
    Denise
     
     

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    Succession in Action, Part 2: Interview with Candi Horton from Baksheesh

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    Candi Horton and her husband, Brian Smucker, are former owners of Baksheesh Fair Trade in Sonoma and St. Helena, CA. Their work in fair trade spanned almost 20 years. Candi talks about their process of selling their business below.
    What was your exit plan?
    As we looked toward retirement from fair trade retailing we had two goals: have the business continue beyond our retirement and retire early enough to pursue other interests. This required a long term plan.
    Consideration was given to closing the stores. This was counter to our reasons for starting stores in the first place. Our purpose in opening stores was to create jobs. To close the business would affect local staff, vendors and artisans. We wanted those jobs to continue.
    That left selling the stores. But did we have something worth selling? We contacted an outside business valuation company and contracted with them for an overview of the business. This report provided a selling price and areas of operation that could be improved.
    How did you decide to when to retire?
    We wanted to do it early enough so we still had the health and energy to pursue other interests. This is quite a subjective goal but for us it meant retiring in our early 60s. With that benchmark discussed and established we could move on to a plan.
    How did you plan for a seamless transition?
    Guaranteeing the business’ long term viability after we were gone was very important to us. If at all possible we wanted to sell to someone who understood our community, had a solid commitment to fair trade and had the retail expertise to keep the stores moving forward. For us, that meant looking to our current staff for interest in purchasing the business.
    A five year plan was structured. Each year training would be scheduled for a different area of retail management including customer service, inventory control, accounting/payroll, advertising/promotion and staffing/training. As each area was covered the owner-in-training would have on-going responsibility for that area. At the end of each year all parties would meet to review the next steps and confirm continued interest in proceeding. With this plan in place we approached our staff for interest.
    With the five year plan we also committed to assistance in financing the purchase which would include retaining sufficient cash on hand for operations. To start with we assumed this would mean support in securing a small business loan. In fact, it ended with us holding the ten year sales contracts.
    Did it work?
    The plan only failed when we failed to follow the plan – sadly. The first store worked seamlessly. The second store had no one on staff interested in the offer. Instead of lengthening the time frame in order to work with a new staff person who might then be open to the five year plan, the plan was shortened. This proved to be inadequate for proper training and oversight and the store closed. Sticking to the five year plan and adding extra reporting requirements to the sale of the second store may have resulted in a better outcome.

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  • Untitled post 70477

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    What a long, strange and rewarding trip it’s been!

    But thirty five years is long enough, at least for me so it’s time to pass the torch, to hand over the keys to the executive washroom, to let someone younger if not wiser, someone who has the youthful energy and enthusiasm for fair-trade and Nepal take over my place in Ganesh Himal Trading. But before I introduce Austin a quick historical rundown is in order.

    The year 1984, Denise and I take an extended trip to Asia and the S. Pacific. Nepal was our first port of call and after two months we totally fell in love with the country the people and the sweaters, not to mention the myriad other handcrafts. Our sweaters, provided by a Tibetan refugee couple, proved to be our introduction to the business end of Nepal. After a month trekking we returned to Kathmandu enamored with our purchases and were persuaded to set up shop in the states selling Lobsang and Dolkar’s sweaters. Bare in mind this was before the advent of fleece. The sweaters were beautiful and well made, the perfect winter item for the Northwest.

    As one thing leads to another, one trip to Nepal lead to more trips to Nepal, more great treks, more great products and more great people. We met Nhucche who being quite the Newari entrepreneur fronted us 100 sweaters on consignment. We paid when we sold them and returned to Nepal. How’s that for trust! Today we work with Nhucche’s son Amit. We met Meera Bhattari, who was starting the Association of Craft Producers,”Dhukuti”, which is a skills development and income earning project for low income women. Many of you know we still work closely with Meera and ACP and now the Conscious Connections Foundation provides support for the education of the children of the producers. We started working with Tibetan carpet weavers and although we not longer sell carpets this was a further introduction into Tibetan culture. Which lead us indirectly to finding our late friend Namygal and his wife Pemala. A couple that  turned out to be crucial to both ending our shipping nightmares and to supplying us with consistent well made products. We still work closely with Pemela and her daughter Kesang. Kesang has helped set up a workshop on the border of India which provides income for women who are in danger of being trafficked, have lost husbands or have been abused. She also is a driving force in helping CCF with the menstrual pad project.

    As our business grew, we realized that in order to provide consistent quality in the handcrafts and close relationships with the producers we needed someone to essentially manage the day to day operations in Nepal, to field questions about products to insure labels are correct, to make sure the products are finished and shipped on time and to keep everybody happy. Then by both a fortunate and unfortunate turn of events Chunta came into our lives. Chunta is Pemala’s younger sister who with her family had fled Tibet in the early seventies leaving everything behind. The fortunate part is obvious, we could not do what we do today without Chunta. She is respected by all the producers, speaks numerous languages and is so hard working, diligent and creative that it puts me to shame. The unfortunate part is that we actually came to know Chunta because Denise’s mother broke her leg while on a trip to Nepal with us. Chunta was the one who really provided Joy with care and companionship during her convalescence in Nepal, and later as Joy brought her to the states to help out and repay her kindness.

    Of course we put Chunta to work while she was in Spokane, helping us with sales at fairs and festivals. Which leads me to the next part of this narrative. That of how we managed to sell all the sweaters and other products and really establish our business. When we got back to the States after 7 or 8 months of traveling our little box of Nepali handcrafts was waiting for us, much to our surprise. Denise’s Mom and Dad set up a show for us at a local theatre where we did a slide show of our trip and displayed what the items we’d send back. By the end of the evening we’d sold almost everything and our fate was sealed. We borrowed a little money, I went back to Nepal, Denise when to law school and we embarked on the journey. During the three years Denise was in school I spent my time plying the college campus’s doing what we termed “guerrilla vending“ and on the weekends we’d set up our booth selling at various  random festivals, actually anywhere they would have us. Which, by the way took us to some very colorful events, everything from Trout Creek Montana Huckleberry Festival, to the Folk Life Festival in Seattle with a hundred thousand people.

    By the time Denise finished law school Ganesh Himal Trekking and Trading was taking off. One or both of us had gone back and forth to Nepal numerous times and had great contacts with the producer groups and a market. The market however demanded that we be on the road some 200 days a year hauling 50 pound bags of sweaters in and out of various events. But it was a good time and allowed us to talk about the producers in Nepal and how we based our business on an equitable partnership, a model that we learned later was the core of Fair Trade.

    In hindsight the next progression seems fairly obvious but at the time I thought it was both a stroke of brilliance and a more than a bit of luck. The luck part was the formation of the Fair Trade Federation, which Denise tuned into right from the beginning. We participated in some of the first Fair Trade Federation conferences which gave us the opportunity to network with retail stores which were members of the FTF. The obvious part was our slow transition from retail to wholesale. I mean how long could our bodies hold up hauling sweaters around plus wholesale gave us the opportunity to provide more work and support to the producers in Nepal. Also shortly after this our son Cameron Norbu was born. He was immediately indoctrinated into Nepali culture and fair trade by taking his first trip to Nepal at the tender age of five months. He subsequently has spend much of his young life going back and forth to Nepal and not only helped form CCF but spent most of a gap year in Nepal after the 2015 earthquake leading projects that CCF was involved in.

    Which leads me back to where this all started, with my retirement and the introduction of Austin as Denise’s partner. The transition from retail to wholesale required that we find employees to work with us since it rapidly became more than the two of us good handle. Denise and I would still be on the road throughout the Northwest showing and selling products to fair trade stores. Cameron would be packed in with the goods. At home however Cameron was in need of someone to hang with him sometimes during the day. So enter Austin at age 14. In a way Austin was also indoctrinated into fair trade at a young age. She slowly began doing projects for the business during her summer breaks and when she was home from college. She actually helped us collate our first paper catalog which was a demanding job at the time. It was obvious from the beginning that Austin paid a great deal of attention to detail. Denise could  give her a task and it would be done and done well. So after Austin finished college and spend a couple years playing professional volleyball in Europe she returned to Spokane, contacted us and asked if we had any work she could do. Again the timing was perfect, our customer base was growing our products were increasing and the opportunity to have Austin even part time was too good to pass up.

    I remember Denise asking Austin what she wanted to do after returning to Spokane, she replied that she really wanted to work in fair trade. OK, how’s that for fate! I’m not sure we thought about it at the time, but Austin’s enthusiasm and commitment to Ganesh Himal, which included a self funded trip to Nepal, proved to be the perfect transitional opportunity for both of us.

    As long winded as this narrative is it but a brief encapsulation of thirty plus years of working with wonderful and amazing people both in Nepal and across the US. We’ve gone from selling sweaters out of the back of our truck to selling to some four hundred stores around the country. Granted it’s been a fair bit of work, pun intended, but we could not have done it without everyone involved, the producers in Nepal, the stores committed to fair trade and of course our terrific staff. So I feel grateful to have had the opportunity to make this work my life and I now feel grateful to have the pleasure to past this legacy onto Austin. Namaste, Ric

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  • Planting Seeds

    Planting Seeds

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    Planting Seeds

    Nature is and always will be my best teacher. The wealth of wisdom that she shares in the simplest things astounds me. And so I ask questions and she responds in my dreams. When I asked the question of “What is the nature of a healthy business?” her response, “think of a seed”.  And so I have been thinking a lot of seeds!

    So often in business we look only at today, the blossoming of the flower, occasionally dipping back into the past for lessons learned and rarely planning for the blossoms to happen years from now. Seeds have a lot to teach. They hold the wisdom of the strength of past practices but they also hold within their tiny breadth the complete package for the continuation of generations of blossoms to come.

    To continue our vision of Fair Trade we need to be like a seed. We need to plant the seeds now that will allow our businesses to thrive long after we are gone. We owe that to the producers, to the movement and to the customers that have grown to love, support and depend on us to provide fair trade goods. And we owe it to perpetuating the wisdom that we have garnered along the way.

    Ric and I started Ganesh Himal Trading as youngsters, 35 years ago. Throughout the years we have cultivated a warm and compassionate staff here in the US and an amazing group of partners in Nepal that have made it their life’s work to make our collective vision a reality. That was the first seed planted.  But leadership has to evolve away from founders and into the hands of those who have been mentored.  Eight years ago we started to cultivate the soil for the planting of the seed that would allow for the continuation of our dream far into the future, encapsulating the Fair Trade values and relationships cultivated over these 35 years.

    And so on June 1, Ric retired and Austin, who many of you know, became my business partner. This transition has been a long time in the making and has been cultivated with the same care as the rest of Ganesh Himal Trading. Read on to hear their thoughts on letting go and moving forward.

    If Fair Trade is to grow and prosper we need to engage in what it takes to transition and to do it now. We have seen many great businesses continue on because of this planning and far too many fail. Take care that the seeds you planted are well tended and ready to blossom again and again, without you, into the future.  Our Fair Trade partners and movement  deserve that care.

    Making the transition legal!

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  • Artisan Earthquake Relief Fund Update: Kirtipur Weaving Group Workshop is Complete!

    Artisan Earthquake Relief Fund Update: Kirtipur Weaving Group Workshop is Complete!

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    Artisan Earthquake Relief Fund Update: Kirtipur Weaving Group Workshop is Complete!

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    CCF is pleased to share the news that thanks to our generous donors like you, the Kirtipur Weaving Group’s earthquake resilient workshop has been built and is soon to be filled with looms, weavers and activity. The weavers of Kirtipur, near Kathmandu, had their looms in their homes before the April and May 2015 earthquakes but most of their homes were destroyed making it impossible to produce any weavings or earn needed income. CCF initially assisted them in rebuilding their homes then waited as they decided how they wanted to proceed in the future. After securing their homes and recovering a bit from the trauma of the earthquake the group determined that they wanted to have a weaving workshop where they could come together to weave.
    Sudha Maharjan(photo), with a masters in social work, now leads the group. Her mother Laxmi was the initial founder. Sudha remembers her mother saying to her daughters, “Wake up early and help me to weave if you want to get delicious lunch and pay your school fees”. So Sudha and her sister used to wake up at 4 am to weave before heading to school. Gradually, they started to try new techniques and affiliated themselves with a Fair Trade buyer. “We had nothing, but now we have our own homes, live a decent life by fulfilling all our wishes and provide employment opportunities to other weavers to uplift their living standard is a dream come true” adds Sudha.
    In the Kirtipur Weaving Group, there are 10 weavers and 10 women who warp the looms. They are very excited about their new workshop which is more spacious and has better lighting and airflow. The nearby toilet and store room are added benefits. The weavers look forward beginning to weave together in their new space after the October Dashain festival and in the future they hope to train new, younger weavers and hold workshops in this community space.

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    In the News

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    Law school grad stays connected to the people of Nepal from her Spokane home
     BY ELI FRANCOVICH
    from The University of Washington Alum School Magazine
    JUNE  2017

    It was 3:30 in the morning on April 25, 2015 when Denise Attwood’s phone rang. She was sound asleep in her Spokane home. Jarred awake, she learned that Nepal, one of the world’s poorest and least developed countries, had been devastated by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake.

    More than 8,000 people were killed and another 20,000 injured. A medical clinic that Attwood, ’88, had helped build was leveled by an avalanche of mud and boulders loosened from the world’s steepest mountain range. The quake was so powerful it lifted Kathmandu, the country’s capital city, three feet. Sitting in her darkened bedroom 7,000 miles away, Attwood was stunned. Then she got busy. After all, it was her desire to help the world’s most vulnerable people that led her to apply to the UW School of Law in the first place three decades ago.

    Attwood, who filled out her law school application while on a boat between Hong Kong and Shanghai, had altruistic intentions. But she had no idea what she was in for after graduation. She recalls an incident when she worked for the Legal Action Center in Seattle. One of her clients, recently released from a mental institution, had run up enormous credit card debt. The woman was “totally delusional” and shouldn’t have been living alone, Attwood recalls. “People would come in with these gaping wounds, and I didn’t even have a full-size Band-Aid,” she says. “I just had a little tiny one.”

    At the same time, other forces began pushing Attwood toward Nepal.

    CONTINUE>

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    Throwing their Hearts into Business
    BY FRANCES BADGETT
    from Western Washington University Magazine
    JULY 2017

    Denise Attwood (’83) and Ric Conner (’85) were on a trek in Nepal 30 years ago when they bought two sweaters that changed their lives: The family who made them, Tibetan refugees, asked Attwood and Conner to help them sell sweaters in the U.S.

    “Ric is a great entrepreneur and I’m a social justice nut,” says Attwood, who met Conner at a Huxley College potluck. Those two sweaters opened up a whole world of talented, hard-working craftspeople in one of the poorest regions in the world.

    A few thousand sweaters later, they started Ganesh Himal Trading, LLC, to sell goods from Nepal in stores across the U.S. and Canada. Ganesh Himal Trading has since expanded into paper goods, baskets and other products.

    Respect for people and the planet

    When Attwood and Conner started, very few people were versed in the practice of fair trade, which encompasses respect for the environment, long-term relationships and livable wages for the producers, and financial support of the region. Today, Ganesh Himal Trading employs hundreds of Nepali and Tibetan craft producers.

    “It’s only been 30 years and look at how conscious consumers are today,” Attwood says. “And it makes a huge difference. We see the change in the producers’ lives. We’ve seen families send their daughters to get masters degrees.”

    Building Ganesh Himal offered another opportunity to Attwood and Conner to make a difference—the Baseri Health Clinic. On their first trek to Nepal, Attwood and Conner had met a 14-year-old girl, Sita Gurung. Eight years later in the Bangkok airport, the couple reunited with Gurung in a chance encounter.

    CONTINUE>

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  • Untitled post 28627

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    ARTISAN SPOTLIGHT:

    Khlapsang Karpo Women Recycled Handcrafts

     img_8894

    Due to its remote location, Ganesh Himal Trading had to be creative with the raw materials used for products made by this group. All scraps of sari fabric and beads are transported on the backs of the villagers over a two day mountain trek to their community.  Lack of tools and electricity create another obstacle to producing products.  Determined to provide economic opportunity to women in this village following the devastating earthquake of April 2015,  Ganesh Himal Trading combined simple skill with beautiful detail to make this one of a  kind wearable art.

     
    Two days walk from any road lies the village of Sertung.  Ganesh Himal Trading’s owners walked through this village in the fall of 2015 during their survey of damage in the remote Northern regions of Dhading district following the April 2015 earthquakes.  During this visit they met a young woman who was the health care worker there and her husband.  Their village was so heavily damaged and they wanted to know if we could help them get some economic income to the women and children left in the village (Conscious Connections Foundation also provided blankets).
    “Namaste, I would like to thanks for order necklaces. Our women life story is  in Sertung women are  maximum uneducated but they are everyday hard working.   They do old type of farming and after planting they wait six month to get the crop.They have no [income generating] work. They are after earthquake live in small trap. This recycle necklace made them if you buy continue this necklace they get good incoming job.and help thier child study.”  -Yogendra
    The group name chosen by the women was “Khlapsang Karpo Women Recycled Handcrafts”, Khlapsang means “Good God” and Kharpo means “white”, this is the Tamang name for Ganesh Himal, the mountain whose shadow they live beneath. To start they are training about ten women and one man with others who are eager to be trained.  The women include: Chesang Tamang, Khasa Maya Tamang,  Tikhri Tamang, Lili Maya Bika, Heni Maya Tamang,  Kheti Maya Tamang, Bata Maya Tamang, Ruku Maya Tamang, Gyalmo Tamang, Mili Maya Tamang,Toni Maya Tamang, and Yogendra Tamang.
    Learn more about the Tamang people  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamang_people

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  • Untitled post 27167

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    Looking Backward, Moving forward

    16 months have passed since Ganesh Himal Trading and The Conscious Connections Foundation were plunged headlong into humanitarian aid relief due to the devastating earthquakes that rocked Nepal and our producer partners lives. We have been engaged in a crash course in humanitarian aid this past year which has given us a chance to see both direct aid and Fair Trade in action. The lessons learned have been phenomenal. For those of you who are Fair Trade retailers or are Fair Trade consumers, we cannot tell you how much our resolve to promote fair trade was strengthened through this entire experience. We deeply believe in the validity of this work because of how we have seen our Fair Trade partners rebound. Our son, Cameron, who volunteered thousands of hours in Nepal doing earthquake relief said it best…
    “Over the past year, I have spent months distributing immediate aid to the victims of the 2015 Nepal earthquake, rebuilding homes, schools, and healthcare facilities that had been destroyed, and working in refugee camps throughout Northern Greece for the thousands of people fleeing violence in the Middle East. When all said and done, we were able to accomplish amazing work, under stressful conditions, often with limited funding. Yet despite our success, this work brought home to me once again just how drastically different fair trade is from humanitarian aid, and how much more influential the former has the potential to be.  My return home was filled with such a deep appreciation for the Fair Trade work done by my parents and Ganesh Himal Trading because it so perfectly demonstrates how simple fair business practices produce the end results that all aid is meant to attain, often much better than aid organizations themselves. This is what I believe the result of Fair Trade to be: a community of equals given access to a way of developing their own lives, that of their families, and in turn their communities so that those affected can live secure in the knowledge that they and their children poses fundamental human rights & economic security through the hard times. Rights which so often are not afforded to those without a voice.Development aid is a very fragile idea; how can a community develop if there is no way for ideas to be melded, relationships made, ownership cultivated, and respect enforced? All too often aid is poured into a country by governments and multinational aid organizations only to create a dependency in beneficiaries, because as soon as the emergency food is distributed and the programs begun, the next crisis must be attended to, leaving those behind to cope with their new found projects alone, and with no partners to grow alongside.  My new found appreciation for fair trade revolves around its outcome of empowerment, where those involved are not beneficiaries of a program, but business partners invested in their future. Not someone in need but someone with power.”
    Never have we at GHT and CCF had to rely on others so much and in all humility each community stepped fully up to the plate: our community in Nepal were some of the first to deliver aid and persevered under unbelievable adversity, our staff at GHT stepped up their commitment to their jobs and to volunteer, CCF board members spent months of volunteer time in Nepal and our community of fair trade friends and stores stood steadfast by our side. Together we have accomplished so much through this unbelievably trying time and because of you many people’s lives have been relieved of much suffering and are slowly coming back to normal. We have an amazing community and together an amazing way of helping to transform the world. Fair Trade. Never doubt that it makes a difference. We have stood together through the worst of times and come out stronger on the other side.  Thank you for supporting Fair Trade from Nepal.

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  • Namaste

    Namaste

    Namaste from Nepal! 

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    Project4
    Read the whole newsletter here

    There is nothing like seeing hope for the future in the midst of hardship and devastation that seems insurmountable. But it’s here, alive and well in Nepal and it’s unbelievable.  The unbeatable Nepali spirit is a constant inspiration and makes me realize that perception can often help us beat the odds. For Nepali’s they have no option so they make the best of a very, very difficult situation and amazingly theydo it with a smile.  So we move forward into a New Year (literally, the Nepali New Year is in a few weeks) with the odds still difficult but the will as strong as the Himalaya!

    Being in Nepal we get to see the spirit of the future in the brightness of the eyes of the 3 young women who received the Joy Attwood College Scholarship fund from CCF several days ago. Three girls who worked hard, even when they lost their homes.  Girls who had the tenacity to continue to work hard in school and apply for and win the CCF scholarships. They and their parents were so proud. The
           scholarship recipients
    y kept their hope alive through it all and see themselves becoming nurses and a cardiologist and returning to their villages to care for the poor. Their parents work with the Fair Trade organization, the Association for Craft Producers, which has had the foresight to organize stipends from CCF’s Power of 5 donations to enable the producers to keep their girls in school. It keeps hope alive. We have seen first hand the effect of your donations to Conscious Connections Foundation and the effectiveness that this money and kindness has wrought. We have been very deliberate with this money and have seen hope come alive in areas where we thought none could exist. We cannot thank you enough for that support, both monetarily and spiritually. CCF board member Cameron Conner and CCF volunteer Grant Gallaher have just completed an extensive evaluation of the work of CCF over these past 11 months of Earthquake relief so that you can see where your dollars went and how effective they were. We invite you all to take a look at this and realize how your donations have kept hope alive.
    Through these past 11 months we have also witnessed, in a very unique way, the value of economic partnership, through long-standing fair trade relationships. Fair Trade Federation members, in addition to Ganesh Himal, have kept producers hope alive and helped them weather an incomprehensible natural disaster. It strengthens my belief in the Fair Trade model even more and makes me understand how valuable it is in creating a future that is hopeful. There is a Hindu proverb that says it all “Help your neighbor’s boat across and lo, your own has reached the shore”. It really is that simple. We can help each other; it keeps hope alive.
    There are so many stories I could share with you but right now we have a clinic to build, a small rural K-3 school to finish, more food aid to distribute, producers to work with and new products to create!  Thank you for standing beside us and keeping our hope alive. I hope to have more amazing stories to share with you in the near future.
    Namaste,
    Denise & Ric

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