We are excited to announce the launch of our spring 2025 FTL social media series!
Fair Trade Learning (FTL) is the guiding framework of the Collaborative. In this season of hope and renewal  we are lifting up and encouraging you to reflect on its 13 principles. Look for posts every few days promoting our commitment to ethical community-based global learning, along with resources, polls, light reflection questions, and invitations to join us in advancing FTL. Invite others into the conversation by reposting with #FairTradeLearning

With each principle we note its aspirational possibilities, a useful practice as suggested by institutions, organizations, and individuals who have extensive experience with Fair Trade Learning. Making decisions with members of the host community or partner organization can be practiced when adding service to educational programming and choosing how host community students might interact with visiting students. It takes a conscious centering of community to come to agreement on long-term mutuality of goals and aspirations. Like the 12 forthcoming FTL principles, common purposes is practiced in universities, NGOs, ethical businesses, and faith institutions that engage in immersive, community-engaged partnerships. #FairTradeLearning

A commitment to principles is necessary but not sufficient. As Crabtree (2008, p. 26) notes, “We need more than an ethos of reciprocity as a guide; we need to learn the…on-the-ground strategies that are more likely to produce mutuality.” How we determine who qualifies as a community leader is just as important as when and how we invite host sites and partners into collaboration. #FairTradeLearning

Description goes herePatients seeking healthcare and youth in orphanages are two vulnerable populations that FTL steers programs away from engaging. As a part of its commitment to FTL, longtime Collaborative partners Child Family Health International has been conducting a multi-year Fair Trade Learning review. Post number 4 of our spring 2025 #FairTradeLearning social media series.

Our roles in CBGL programs are not always clear-cut: community members also can be program students; educators also are community members (in their home communities). Both-and thinking generally can help to overcome limiting frameworks about partnership, goals, and mutual benefit. Post number 5 of our spring 2025 #FairTradeLearning social media series.

#FairTradeLearning principles themselves “emerged from a community-articulated vision of what partnerships should embody.” See Hartman and other related articles here:. This partial collection continues to expand, as the number of scholars, community organizations and academic institutions applying this approach increases. Even if partners are not at the table when CBGL programs are first designed, they do not have to remain on the menu and can be given a seat in deciding goals for their community. Share in a comment other examples of FTL in action and theory! Post number 6 of our spring 2025 social media series. 

Does practicing Fair Trade Learning result in higher achievement of student learning outcomes? Organizations like Gap Year Association have adapted reflection activities and other best practices in experiential learning to grow intercultural skills, empathy, and global civic understandings among their participants. Treating students as colleagues by including their voices in planning as well as implementation (and evaluation) can be a lesson in civic action. Post number 7 of our spring 2025 #FairTradeLearning social media series.

How do we recognize then move away from recruitment materials that reproduce stereotypical and simplistic portrayals of community members? Simplistic stories are dangerous stories. While materials that portray diverse scenes and interactions are a step forward, it is important that writers, photographers, web developers, etc., understand and express responsible social mission via these materials. Post number 9 of our spring 2025 #FairTradeLearning social media series. 

#FairTradeLearning is built on trusting relationships. Many partnerships begin between two individuals who are able to communicate successfully across cultural and other differences. Initially, messages might increase and decrease dramatically near once-annual programming. Considering the collective nature of CBGL, it is important to both expand the consistency of communication and who is involved in the collaboration. Sustaining communication and projects themselves are more likely to occur when an increasingly dense communication network includes individuals previously unaware of one another. Post number 10 of our spring 2025 social media series.

Our #FairTradeLearning rubric helps educators see how we might move from simplistic reflection to more formal critical (and even decolonial) reflection. In early FTL stages, formal programming tends to focus on the experience, and conversations on the “service” are unplanned or ad hoc. Next we might attempt to integrate reflection in an unsystematic “roses and thorns” or other “top of the head reasoning” sort of way. Introducing participants to materials specific to the community, culture, as well as service and development ideals and critiques is another step toward aspirational learning integration. We can further encourage students to consider global citizenship and social responsibility through artfully facilitated dialogues on responsible engagement, cross-cultural cooperation, and positive impact within our communities. Post number 11 of our spring 2025 social media series.

The greatest community impact that a CBGL program might have is in equitably supporting local housing, transportation, and meals. We can move closer toward the aspirational in this principle first by inviting a local leader to own most of the decisions relating to sourcing. Sometimes this person might make an effort to distribute resources among community-owned businesses and institutions, sometimes they do not. After building a denser network of trusting relationships we might see that decisions about housing, transportation, and meals should reflect shared commitment to community change, sustainability, and/or a specific development model. Partners might desire impact to be deliberately spread among multiple community stakeholders, or concentrated within one organization or issue of public concern. Post number 12 of our spring 2025 #FairTradeLearning social media series.

There are journal articles and even entire books on some of these individual principles. Before achieving clarity of ongoing commitment we might first establish commitments specific to individual program contracts, which reflect economic exchange and obligations. Partners can move toward shared reasons and processes for the collaboration by developing open-ended commitments understood in relational terms. Campus-based programs can reserve time and resources to ensure partners have a clear understanding of the ongoing relationship and a common definition of partnership success. Post number 13 of our spring 2025 #FairTradeLearning social media series.

At the lower end of this principle is an economic model, financial exchange amounts, and impacts that are not accessible to all partners. One step toward greater transparency is for both the university and NGO to make a broad form of budget available, such as through 990 disclosure. It takes conscious effort to continue toward greater transparency where partners share full budgets with one another and with interested community members, as well as with any other stakeholders who request access. Post number 14 of our spring 2025 #FairTradeLearning social media series.