Are you worried about how to show your love with a Fair Trade Valentine’s card while Rainbow Turtle, and lots of other ethical shops, are still closed? Especially with the big day approaching quickly? Well, the Fairtrade Foundation have stepped up with a fun series of eCards that you can download here. Whether your partner is nuts for Fair Trade or just as sweet as sugar, you’ll find the romantic card for you!
Welcome to the new Rainbow Turtle Rebooted podcast. Through our podcasts we would like to bring you interviews and news about fair trade. This episode is a short preview to our first series and introduces you to who we are and what we will be offering.
Please subscribe to our podcast which you can find on Apple, Spotify, Google and Amazon podcasts.
Rainbow Turtle is a small non-profit organisation, based in Paisley, Scotland. We provide a delightful shop in Gauze Street, where you can buy fair trade teas and coffees, food, cards and gifts. We also offer an education service to local schools and church groups. We view our young people as the purchasers and decision makers of the future.
For more information about Rainbow Turtle and what we do please go to our website: www.rainbowturtle.org.uk.
With lots more time being spent at home, many of us have turned to online learning as a way to not only fill time and entertain us, but also broaden our horizons when the world can feel so small. Our Education Officer, Gemma, has been trying out some Fair Trade focused courses, previously recommending the Who Made My Clothes? course on our blog.
This month, Gemma has been learning from a more general course, hosted by the Open University on their free platform Open Learn. The course, Campaigns and Organisations, covers how to effectively manage a campaign as part of a charity or voluntary organisation – something that many Rainbow Turtle supporters may find interesting in the run up to Fairtrade Fortnight! It’s a short course – said to take around 2 hours of online study – that gives lots of useful information in a straightforward way.
It begins with a short case study about a parent teacher association which is campaigning for the lowering of the speed limit on roads within the vicinity of its school and uses their example to emphasise the importance of focusing efforts on one issue at a time and knowing who the issue will benefit and who to target to get it done.
Particularly interesting is a recorded interview between Terry O’Sullivan, Senior Lecturer in Management at the Open University Business School, and Chris Stalker, Head of Campaigning Effectiveness at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations. They discuss many important factors to consider when campaigning, with the most salient advice being to be absolutely clear from the beginning about what you are trying to achieve. They also cover how to decide who to target with your campaign (e.g. political figures or the general public), how to manage problems (such as focusing too much on either fundraising or campaigning activities), how to approach the media, how to use technology in your campaign, and how to assess your impact as you progress. Most interesting for Rainbow Turtle was their advice on how to “punch above your weight” in campaigning as a small organisation by considering carefully how to use your finite resources of time and money.
The Open University pack in a great deal of useful information into this very short – and free! – course and it will be a huge help to many campaigners, particularly if they are just starting out.
Banana farmers in Ghana are being left with an inflated tarrif to pay when their goods enter the UK, thanks to new arrangements agreed post-Brexit. This unexpected extra cost will negatively impact their already precarious livelihoods.
This comes despite a joint statement from the UK and Ghanaian governments saying that they had:
“reached a consensus on the main elements of a new trade agreement” that “provides the basis to replicate, the effects of the existing trade relationship between the UK and Ghana.”
We’re asking you to contact the UK Secretary of State for Internation Trade Liz Truss, using this letter, to request that urgent action be taken to return to previous trade agreements and compensate importers for any loses already incurred so that they will not be passed on to farmers.
You can read more about this here.
With lockdown continuing across Scotland, and Rainbow Turtle staying closed for the time being, you might be looking for somewhere to get your fix of Fair Trade fun and information…
5 Ways to Choose the World You Want in 2021
The Fairtrade Foundation have compiled a list of five ways to celebrate and learn about Fairtrade and look ahead to a better 2021 while we’re all stuck at home. Their suggestions include their upcoming Choose the World You Want festival, a look at how Fairtrade is aiding in the empowerment of female workers, and more! Click here for more information.
Development, Enterprise and Trade Webinar
Martin Rhodes, the Chief Executive of the Scottish Fair Trade Forum, is chairing a webinar on 28th January, looking at sustainable development and sharing learning from the Malawi CROPS project. This is a great opportunity for those interested in Fair Trade and sustainability to hear about this directly from those who work on it around the world.
Making Veganuary Extra Good – Vegan and Fair Trade
Just Trading Scotland are celebrating Veganuary over on their blog, with loads of ideas for recipes that are both vegan and Fair Trade. We sell a large range of JTS’s products in the Rainbow Turtle shop, so you may already have some of them in your cupboards, ready to be turned into a delicious vegan meal!
Let us know over on social media if any of these ideas inspire you!
The Fairtrade Foundation have recently shared the Fairtrade Fortnight theme for 2021: ‘Climate, Fairtrade and You’! Fairtrade Fortnight takes place 22 February – 7 March 2021 and so will be taking a different format from previous years, with limited opportunities for in-person learning and campaigning. We’ll be keeping you up to date on everything the Fairtrade Foundation, and others, have planned for this year’s exciting and relevant theme!
First up, for those aged 5 to 25, there’s the opportunity to ‘share your vision of the world you want’ as part of a youth exhibition of art, film, and creative writing on Fairtrade and the environment. You can find out more about this, including how to enter your work, here.
Teachers, parents, and guardians may be interested in this activity as a way to bring the ideas of Fair Trade into learning from home!
It’s a new year but, with most of Scotland in a strict lockdown, we’re not sure it’s quite a happy one yet. But there are still rainbows to come after the rain! As we suspected might end up being the case, we can’t yet give a date for Rainbow Turtle reopening, but as soon as we know, you’ll know. Keep an eye on our social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram) or sign up for our monthtly newsletter to stay in the loop!
2020 has been a difficult year, and we have only got through it thanks to the huge amount of support and encouragement from you: our supporters, customers, friends, and volunteers. Thank you!
The new year will kick off with a little uncertainty, with Rainbow Turtle now closed and most of Scotland in a level 4 lockdown, but we’re confident that we can get 2021 off to a great start, even if that does have to be a little bit later than normal!
We hope that you all have a wonderful, if unusual, Christmas and that your new year is a good one. Merry Christmas from all at Rainbow Turtle!
We welcome Alex, our rainbow lion, to our Christmas window. He exemplifies this year’s theme of hope, diversity and inclusivity. Alex was kindly decorated by the pupils of Mary Russell School in Paisley with support from their art teacher, Miss Ferguson.
Alex’s coat of rainbow colours symbolises hope, which is the message of Christmas and much needed at this time. The rainbow has also been adopted by the LGBT community and supporters of the NHS.
We wanted to represent diversity by including a turtle (unfortunately we couldn’t find a rainbow one!) with Alex, our lion. Around the world there are many people who will struggle to make it a happy Christmas this year. We wanted to acknowledge that it is the diversity of beliefs, races of people and sexualities that makes up our world. It is only by working together and supporting the poorest members of our humanity can we make it a better place.
Finally, we wanted to represent inclusivity as the lion and the turtle getting on together. In the bible an image of heaven is the lion lying down with the lamb (or in our case the turtle!) For us at Rainbow Turtle selling fair trade produce, and helping producers in developing countries, helps us to come closer to that image of paradise.
If that is too deep for you, just come to Paisley and admire the creativity of the MRS pupils and admire our Christmas window. And, of course, buy our wonderful produce and crafts.
Our newly decorated lion, has arrived in the shop ready for our grand opening on Saturday 12th December. Thanks to Miss Ferguson, the art teacher, and the students of Mary Russell School, Alex (as the pupils have named him) has had a complete makeover. Resplendent in his rainbow coat of many colours, Alex will adorn our Christmas window to highlight this year’s theme of inclusivity and diversity.
The pupils have included a number of themes into their design of Alex. Firstly, the rainbow patterns covering him. We now have a rainbow lion to go with our rainbow theme of the shop. To us rainbows are symbols of hope and are about diversity and including people from all nations, differing ages, beliefs, and sexualities.
On one side of Alex is a rainbow coloured tree, apparently this is because trees are made up of different components. On the top are painted the symbols of the fair trade movement, which is about supporting producers in developing countries by buying their produce at fair prices and allowing them to work in decent conditions.
On the other side of Alex is our logo, the rainbow turtle. Turtles are almost self sufficient because they carry their house with them. However, when they’re upside down they are completely vulnerable to attack, which is a bit like our fair trade producers. The fact that the pupils have included all these elements in the design gives me so much hope in our young people for the future. With attitudes like these our world will be in a good place.
