Good Karma from fair trade

from The Toronto Star

Stuart Laidlaw

Alice Rankin was cleaning out her room recently, putting away clothes and throwing out magazines, when an image in one publication caught her eye.

"There was this guy – his shoulder was just covered in cuts and bruises," the Grade 12 student at Eastdale Collegiate Institute says, shuddering at the memory. "It was disgusting."

The photo in Faze Magazine was of a teenaged boy in the Ivory Coast with scars all over his body after he was beaten for trying to escape from a cocoa plantation. He and other orphaned children worked as slaves to produce the chocolate used in candy bars in developed countries such as Canada.

The story tugged at Rankin's heart. She loves chocolate, but hated the idea that 70 per cent of the world's chocolate comes from such plantations. So she switched to fair-trade chocolate, made with cocoa grown sustainably and with guarantees the plantation workers are treated well.

"I haven't eaten a regular chocolate since I read that story," she says. "The fair-trade stuff tastes better, anyway."

Now she is part of a campaign by students at her school to convince other students to eschew regular chocolate in favour of fair-trade bars. One day, they would like to see only fair-trade chocolate used in school fundraisers.

Rankin and about a dozen other students formed the Karma Club as a vehicle for their work last fall and have become engaged in political action in ways they never would have dreamed possible not so long ago.

They put on a Make Poverty History assembly for the students in the fall, using video and sketches to present the face of poverty around the world. They also sold white bracelets to raise money for the international anti-poverty campaign.

"So many people wanted one, I had to sell my own bracelet," says Zoë Williams-Barrieau, also in Grade 12.

Teacher Bruce Lyne says the club is a way to show the students that they can have an impact in the world and that their ideas matter. That is especially true, he says, at a school like Eastdale.

For many of the 230 students at the school, Eastdale is a place of last resort, Lyne says. It's the school teenagers go to when everyone from teachers to family has largely given up on them, but before they have completely given up on themselves.

Many come from difficult home lives, where incomes and housing are unstable at best. Many have switched schools numeroustimes already, making for a shaky academic history. With such backgrounds, Lyne says it is not surprising that behavioural problems afflict some students.

"A lot of the behavioural problems come from a sense of insecurity," says Lyne, who oversees the club with teacher Irene Andrianpolitis.

The Karma Club helps to counteract that insecurity by showing the teens they have something to contribute to society, that their opinions matter.

"There are some good things coming out of inner-city schools," he says, adding the school itself hopes to offer a safe and stable place for teens who may find such things lacking in the rest of their lives.

He admits that the students at Eastdale, coming from such troubled backgrounds, are not the typical teens to get involved in such projects.

There is no resume-stuffing at this school, he says. Few of these students are motivated by making their college or university application look as good as possible.

Instead, like Rankin, their own life experience motivates them to try to make a better world.

"They already have an acute innate sense of social justice," he says. "What they don't have is the tools to do something about that."

A meeting of the club is a raucous affair of lively debate as the students thrash out what to do next.

A discussion about getting others to stop eating mainstream chocolate is interrupted by a proposal to start a petition calling for tougher penalties for pedophiles and exclamations from the girls in the club about how cute Craig Kielburger is. They met the young activist at a conference last fall.

Lyne says that despite all the enthusiasm, he never fears that the students will get too far ahead of themselves, believing that they can make a huge difference and end up disappointed when reality sets in and they have only been able to make a dent in their own corner of the world.

Just as the injustices in their own lives inspire them to act, he says, they temper their expectations.

"These people are pretty realistic," he says.

"They come from a world where doubt is predominant."