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Fair Trade Curriculum: Win Win Solutions |
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Equal Exchange and collaborators created Win Win Solutions: An Introduction to Fair Trade and Cooperative Economics as an educational tool to accompany our successful fundraising program. The curriculum is for grades 4-9 and is available on the Equal Exchange website. Launched in December 2007, it has already received positive feedback from teachers, parents and children.
"What we've discovered is how much children care," said Organizing Director Virginia Berman, who led the curriculum project. "Kids don't think the world needs to operate with other children going to bed hungry. It's wonderful and refreshing to work with children who won't accept that as the norm; who prefer the norm to be about fairness. Giving children the tools, helping them see themselves as problem solvers - even with big problems - is consistent with what Equal Exchange strives to do.” 
In February 2007, Berman visited a kindergarten class in the Boston Public Schools to teach a lesson from the curriculum. “We talked about how they got to school compared to kids in farming communities, and what they saw on the way compared to what a child in the Dominican Republic might have seen on the way to school,” said Berman. “They understood that there are differences. They want to be part of a team and a plan that gets their friends around the world the things they need – things like water and books.”
The visit served as confirmation that children want to live in a just world. “Kids, even this young, are ripe for the Fair Trade message,” Berman said. “What if every kindergarten class had one or two lessons on Fair Trade?”
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