Wil Andruschak

Students (from left) Sarah Knowles, Anna Seltner, Caitria Sunderland and Maria Angelidis

DETAILS

Fair Trade Market
Westmount Charter School
Saturday, December 6 - Saturday, December 6

More in: Special Events

To get to teacher Neil Robinson’s classroom at Westmount Charter School, you have to go down a staircase that looks like it’s leading to a furnace room deep within the bowels of the building. “The dungeon,” jokes a student.

Four Grade 11 girls at Westmount, a publicly funded school for gifted students, have been working overtime in Robinson’s “dungeon” as part of a course called The Human Condition. “We work on it during lunch, after school, all the time,” says Maria Angelidis. The students are organizing a market to raise money for fair trade organizations while educating people about global inequality. “It’s because of the international interest we’ve developed in these classes,” explains student Anna Seltner.

The course, which was developed by Robinson and other Westmount teachers three years ago, goes beyond conventional social studies curriculum to explore topics like human rights, sustainable development, international law and foreign policy. Robinson says the discussion-based course encourages students to look at their future careers through the lens of their global citizenship and social conscience. “So if they’re going to be an engineer, what does being an engineer and being a global citizen who’s actually involved in social justice and all of those types of things — what does that look like?” he says. Another teacher, Tom Musk, says the course is “a strong critique of contemporary society.”

While free trade allows wealthy countries to buy products from poorer countries at extremely low prices, fair trade ensures workers are paid fair wages and given healthy working conditions. Five years ago, it was a marginal social movement; today, even large corporations are getting on board. “We’ve been looking into not only fair trade, but how we can actually make fair trade [on a larger scale], instead of it just being, ‘Oh, this is a great thing we can do in small bits,’” says student Sarah Knowles. “How can it actually work?” Seltner adds: “This is hard. We’ve discovered this is really complex.”

As part of the course, students have to volunteer in some way. The girls chose to run a fair trade market last year and raised $6,000. This year, they have 10 organizations and are hoping to raise more money. “If we can raise the awareness and cause the supply and demand to shift so that the demand is for fair trade products, we’ll see a shift similar to what’s happened with the organic movement,” says Seltner.

The market is in the Westmount gymnasium (2519 Richmond Road S.W.) on Saturday, December 6, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.