By Eric Hartman
Below are my comments as part of a plenary panel at the International Service-Learning Summit at Northwestern University last night. Called "Can ISL be a Fair Trade: Developing a Road Map for Higher Standards," the panel also included Matthias Brown (Association of Clubs, Amizade Site Director, Petersfield, Jamaica), Patrick Green (Loyola University Chicago), and Richard Kiely (Cornell University). The slides are available here. As always, your comments are most welcome.
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Good evening. Thank you for being here. And many thanks to Northwestern’s Center for Global Engagement for hosting – and thank you for your continuous demand for good and community-serving work at the nexus of global university-community partnerships.
I’ve worn the hats of the faculty members leading this work, the researchers publishing on this work, and the nonprofit directors and administrators supporting this work. So I know that no matter how you got here, you’re probably tired. I also know how deeply you want to do this work extremely well – and how many pressures you face that militate against that desire.
That’s why I’m here tonight to talk about a movement now afoot called Fair Trade Learning. The Fair Trade Learning ideal suggests a set of standards to advance more equitable exchange and partnership in a sector that is increasingly driven by consumers who tend to know little about global community development or community-based partnership principles. In a few minutes you’ll hear the story regarding how Fair Trade Learning as an applied ideal emerged from the rural community of Petersfield, Jamaica. It emerged from the Association of Clubs and a house mother collective there, but soon many of us in The United States and elsewhere around the world realized how much we needed this ideal too.
The first people in my little window on the world who really latched onto this concept were the staff members at Amizade Global Service-Learning, where I serve on the board of directors and several years ago served as Executive Director. The Amizade staff enthusiasm grew from the pressures they felt they faced. They felt pinched between, on the one side, organizational ethics and history – that required them to take the time and invest the resources to engage carefully and conscientiously in community-driven development. And on the other side they found themselves increasingly a small player in a growing sector that – as it grew – was suddenly part of a $173 billion dollar global tourism industry.
A market exploded around them. After years as one among several minor players in global university-community partnership, seemingly overnight, they became one rather minor example in a corporate-dominated sector catering to probably compassionate consumers who nonetheless were coming to the idea of doing good rather unprepared in any way other than having digested 15 – 20 years of some of our culture’s most harmful stereotypes about the developing world.
In very practical terms, this means that organizations that systematically invest in communities – and Amizade is one among several here tonight that do this well – are competing with corporations with marketing departments larger than the community-based organizations themselves. And these marketing departments sell the experience of having done good to people who understand themselves as good. It’s not that hard a sell. And it is typically supplemented with glossy photos, opportunities to go to beautiful places, and the clear allure of adventure.
This observation suggests two of my most basic points. The first basic point is that we are operating inside markets. We are a small part of a much larger social phenomenon or corporate sector, however you like to say it. International volunteering is hot. Mission trips, school trips, temple trips, family volunteer vacations – all of these things operate in a sector that often operates through similar or even the same organizations, makes a name for young Americans around the world, and shapes perceptions of you and your students long before you begin to shape your program. If this doesn’t worry you, it should.
But we are in the university. And our first impulse might be to better mind our own affairs. This is laudable, but I’d suggest pushing beyond our community for two reasons. One – there is some kind of expertise that brought you here. Perhaps you’re a public health person, a community development practitioner, or you have a strong background in development or policy studies. Perhaps it is just that you have experiential expertise with university-community engagement. Either way, you know that the nuance of these fields and this practice – and the human implications that extend from outsiders’ uninformed tinkering in others’ communities – are such that there is a moral imperative to set clear and just standards of practice. At the very least we might ameliorate the many harms that have come and might come from uninformed outsider interventions.
Second – the second reason I’d suggest we should be pushing beyond the community gathered here – is I suppose simply historical precedent. Privilege. Authority. Hegemony. These are often dirty words in our fields. But we have places within structures. Our university voices come with at least some opportunity for amplification. It’s our responsibility to look beyond our specific institutional relationships to help this whole cumbersome sector agree to a set of standards and to a strategy to communicate them with a larger public. Because it is the large public that is engaging in these experiences – and there is currently very little in the way of shorthand resources to help consumers understand how to engage responsibly.
Another insight arguably stemming from understanding our roles within markets is that if we can alter consumer perceptions of what counts as quality, we may move consumer behavior toward quality. This is one of the lessons behind sustainable forestry or fair trade coffee and clothing. Perhaps part of communicating quality is sharing how we ourselves make choices about how contractors and subcontractors will be rewarded at locations throughout this rather shockingly expensive educational intervention called global service-learning. That is, our contracting choices determine whether housing costs go to a rotating group of community families or are captured by a dormitory or hostel that is actually owned by a tour company based in New York or London. They determine whether community staff members are justly remunerated, or whether experts in the local community, from the local community, are always a regular part of site direction, leadership, education, and program remuneration. We are in a position to move around fairly vast sums as part of our programming. That privilege can systematically support community development through deliberate local sourcing.
Years ago, for example, the house mother cooperative in Amizade's partner community of Petersfield pushed me, as Executive Director at the time, to raise home stay rates. I was worried those rates were already too high. But we discussed the risks and the opportunity and raised them. Since that time, the house mothers have always set their own rates. It's participatory budgeting in a cooperative and community-based model of village tourism that sprang from the community itself.
Air travel is still expensive and it will always draw a significant portion of our costs, but the difference between making standard corporate decisions in this area and making community-sourcing decisions instead translates quite clearly. The UN World Tourism Organization estimates that, on average, only 5% of tourism dollars stay in communities visited in the global south. In Amizade’s Jamaica partnership, nearly 70% of funds stay in Petersfield – and a significant part of the remaining balance is actually for airfare.
The Fair Trade Learning Standards as they’ve developed are a few pages long. I’m not going to read them to you now, but as a way of concise summary, they suggest 8 things, each being far more robust than I can quickly summarize here, but nonetheless, Fair Trade Learning suggests:
A market exploded around them. After years as one among several minor players in global university-community partnership, seemingly overnight, they became one rather minor example in a corporate-dominated sector catering to probably compassionate consumers who nonetheless were coming to the idea of doing good rather unprepared in any way other than having digested 15 – 20 years of some of our culture’s most harmful stereotypes about the developing world.
In very practical terms, this means that organizations that systematically invest in communities – and Amizade is one among several here tonight that do this well – are competing with corporations with marketing departments larger than the community-based organizations themselves. And these marketing departments sell the experience of having done good to people who understand themselves as good. It’s not that hard a sell. And it is typically supplemented with glossy photos, opportunities to go to beautiful places, and the clear allure of adventure.
This observation suggests two of my most basic points. The first basic point is that we are operating inside markets. We are a small part of a much larger social phenomenon or corporate sector, however you like to say it. International volunteering is hot. Mission trips, school trips, temple trips, family volunteer vacations – all of these things operate in a sector that often operates through similar or even the same organizations, makes a name for young Americans around the world, and shapes perceptions of you and your students long before you begin to shape your program. If this doesn’t worry you, it should.
But we are in the university. And our first impulse might be to better mind our own affairs. This is laudable, but I’d suggest pushing beyond our community for two reasons. One – there is some kind of expertise that brought you here. Perhaps you’re a public health person, a community development practitioner, or you have a strong background in development or policy studies. Perhaps it is just that you have experiential expertise with university-community engagement. Either way, you know that the nuance of these fields and this practice – and the human implications that extend from outsiders’ uninformed tinkering in others’ communities – are such that there is a moral imperative to set clear and just standards of practice. At the very least we might ameliorate the many harms that have come and might come from uninformed outsider interventions.
Second – the second reason I’d suggest we should be pushing beyond the community gathered here – is I suppose simply historical precedent. Privilege. Authority. Hegemony. These are often dirty words in our fields. But we have places within structures. Our university voices come with at least some opportunity for amplification. It’s our responsibility to look beyond our specific institutional relationships to help this whole cumbersome sector agree to a set of standards and to a strategy to communicate them with a larger public. Because it is the large public that is engaging in these experiences – and there is currently very little in the way of shorthand resources to help consumers understand how to engage responsibly.
Another insight arguably stemming from understanding our roles within markets is that if we can alter consumer perceptions of what counts as quality, we may move consumer behavior toward quality. This is one of the lessons behind sustainable forestry or fair trade coffee and clothing. Perhaps part of communicating quality is sharing how we ourselves make choices about how contractors and subcontractors will be rewarded at locations throughout this rather shockingly expensive educational intervention called global service-learning. That is, our contracting choices determine whether housing costs go to a rotating group of community families or are captured by a dormitory or hostel that is actually owned by a tour company based in New York or London. They determine whether community staff members are justly remunerated, or whether experts in the local community, from the local community, are always a regular part of site direction, leadership, education, and program remuneration. We are in a position to move around fairly vast sums as part of our programming. That privilege can systematically support community development through deliberate local sourcing.
Years ago, for example, the house mother cooperative in Amizade's partner community of Petersfield pushed me, as Executive Director at the time, to raise home stay rates. I was worried those rates were already too high. But we discussed the risks and the opportunity and raised them. Since that time, the house mothers have always set their own rates. It's participatory budgeting in a cooperative and community-based model of village tourism that sprang from the community itself.
Air travel is still expensive and it will always draw a significant portion of our costs, but the difference between making standard corporate decisions in this area and making community-sourcing decisions instead translates quite clearly. The UN World Tourism Organization estimates that, on average, only 5% of tourism dollars stay in communities visited in the global south. In Amizade’s Jamaica partnership, nearly 70% of funds stay in Petersfield – and a significant part of the remaining balance is actually for airfare.
The Fair Trade Learning Standards as they’ve developed are a few pages long. I’m not going to read them to you now, but as a way of concise summary, they suggest 8 things, each being far more robust than I can quickly summarize here, but nonetheless, Fair Trade Learning suggests:
- Explicit dual purposes in our work, serving community and serving students simultaneously, and explicitly not privileging students over community
- Community voice and direction – at every step in the process
- Institutional commitment and partnership sustainability - and scholarshipping multidirectional exchange
- Transparency, specifically in respect to economic relationships and transactions
- Environmental Sustainability and Footprint Reduction
- Economic Sustainability in terms of effort to manage funding incursions in the receiving community and fund development at the university in a manner that takes a long view of the relationships involved
- Deliberate diversity, intercultural contact, and reflection to systematically encourage intercultural learning and development among participants and community partners
- Global community building – in the sense that we keep one eye always on the question of how this work pushes us into better relationships around the world; how our civil society networks grow into community; how our efforts abroad should inform our actions at home