A new page

Hey guys!

If you've ever met me, or read my blog for more than 5 minutes, you'll know that I'm a big fan of justice. I've spent a fair amount of time joining amazing teams of abolitionists in the fight towards a world without forced labour or human trafficking.
Modern day slavery is an ugly truth that I've come face to face with and had to decide how I'm going to respond. One of the ways that I've responded is a mission to raise awareness and funds to support justice seeking organizations, but something that I've been struggling with lately is how to use my buying power. I have a hard time walking into a store and buying a chocolate bar that the making of may have involved slave labour, but when you don't know for sure, how does boycotting work? Do I just decide to never buy chocolate? While that may be a good choice health wise, I'm not sure how that makes a difference justice wise. I've been a supporter of fair trade for a while, and I know that's always a good option, but sometimes I don't have that choice, and I'm not sure that this incredible amount of guilt every time that I go to a store that's not %100 fair trade is healthy or helpful.
I've been wrestling with this for months, and I think I finally found an answer in one of my top five favourite books, Ending Slavery by Kevin Bales. I would highly recommend that you read that book at least once (I'm almost done going through it for the second time,) but for now, I'll just give you a quick summary of Chapter 7. Boycotting doesn't work because we can't know for sure whether or not a given product from a given company involved slave labour, so we would have to boycott an entire industry, which doesn't work at all. What does work, is fair trade, but we shouldn't be buying fair trade to boycott others, we should be buying fair trade to support fair trade. This isn't always an option, so don't feel bad when you can't, but when you can, do it.

I've been working on buying "extras" (mostly clothes) either from fair trade stores or from a store that is using profits in a charitable way, but it's hard to find stores like that. Over the past several months I've been putting together a list of online stores that I like to buy from or would like to buy from.
This isn't me patting myself on the back, I just wish that someone had given me a list like this, so I figured I'd make one. It's still pretty short, and I'll be adding more to it, as I find more, so it'll be a new page. I haven't been able to come up with a non-dumb name yet, so it'll be called TBD until I can come up with something more clever.