Socially Responsible Investment

Beyond our collaborative class website, we are planning to interview industry professionals and the public on their views of socially responsible investment. We have contacted Dick Jones of Boston Community Capital in hopes of interviewing him and plan to pole the Wellesley community to determine what they know about SRI and if corporate responsibility is something they will take into consideration when making investments. We want to make our website an easy place for people to go to find out what SRI is and what it’s about .

- Andrea, Joy, and Edem

The Theater Offensive

In an effort to tie the LGBT perspective into our collaborative class website, we are compiling information to present on The Theater Offensive, a queer friendly, community based theater in the Boston area.

Beyond utilizing the theater’s website to gather basic information for our own site, we plan to interview multiple members of the theater in an effort to delve deeper into the functions and ideals of The Theater Offensive.  We plan to contact Eve Alpern, the production and operations director to organize interviews.

In our website we will discuss (among other things):

• Background of the LGBT community/organizations in Boston
• The way in which The Theater Offensive works with other LGBT orgs in Boston (solidarity)
• The youth programs offered by The Theater Offensive and how these promote transformation in future generations
• How The Theater Offensive supports the community through promotion of safe sex and AIDS education

The overall goal of our website is to demonstrate the great potential for change through art and show people how they can get involved in, and give back to, the gay arts community.

- Bailey Brame and Casi Schwisow

A Consumer’s Guide to the Solidarity Economy in Boston

We are going to create a consumer’s guide to the solidarity economy in Boston.  Included in this guide will be the following small businesses:

o      Independent Fabrication

o      Community Builders Cooperative

o      Red Sun Press

o      Boston Organics

o      Industrial Credit Union-Boston

o      Equal Exchange

o      Pro Arte

We are also creating a map of Boston with these businesses.

The mission is to provide consumers with information to proactively use their purchasing power to promote/ further/ expand the solidarity economy in Boston.  As well as serve as a resource for those who want to create a worker co-op, and for those who currently have a worker co-op to share and communicate with one another.

Map of Cooperatives

Fair Trade Research Project

Jessica and I will be researching fair trade and its role in the Boston Solidarity Economy. On our website we think it is really important that we explain fair trade, its history and its ideals. We believe that a lot of the public is unaware of how exploitative free trade really can be but would surely prefer an alternative if they were more informed. In order to get our point across we would like to create a list of pros and cons of trade and globalization. We hope to show that fair trade allows us to keep the pros but lose the cons.

We will give a brief description of the World Fair Trade Organization and research how one obtains certification/qualification of Fair Trade (Fairtrade Labeling Organizations International in Bonn, Germany (www.fairtrade.net); the group in the U.S. that handles the certification of Fair Trade imports and use of the Fair Trade seal is TransFair USA; http://www.transfairusa.org). We hope that this will prompt those viewing our website to seriously consider the option of fair trade and gain at least a basic understanding for what their next steps should be.

As it appears now, the audience for our website will be producers or business owners that are in a position to instigate a switch to fair trade. We hope that all will benefit from our site however and newly informed consumers always have the power to suggest to business owners that they consider fair trade.

Jessica and I plan to use Equal Exchange as our case study. We will give a history of the company, its motivations for practicing fair trade and explain the logistics of how it operates. We hope to go on a tour of the Equal Exchange office in West Bridgewater on May 11th.

The more creative component of our project will hopefully be a short film on Equal Exchange. When at the office we plan to talk to employees about their work experiences there and why they work there. We will also record the working environment and the facility as we go on our tour. Before we conduct video interviews, will contact the Equal Exchange press/media contact person, Rodney North (rodney@equalexchange.coop)

In order to get the consumer perspective we will visit the Equal Exchange Café in Boston to talk to the customers. We hope to ask them what factors go into their decisions to consume Equal Exchange products and what other ways they incorporate the solidarity economy into their lives.

Completing the Circle: Bringing it Back Home

We are and can be connected to the solidarity economy on three different levels: an individual level, a group level, and a community level.

For our group project we are going to explore the connection between the solidarity economies we have researched and Wellesley College.  We will look at how Wellesley College students can get involved with these solidarity economies (for example through internships and projects inspired by these groups), how our group project itself is contributing to the solidarity economy (through spreading the word and creating global ties), and how Wellesley College community as a whole is involved (for example through the Wintersession trip to India and CWS programs).

Although the solidarity economy is about locality and subsidiarity it is also about thinking globally, which is why we chose this project.  While other groups are exploring the Boston area we are exploring the solidaritous notion of thinking globally and acting locally. Our actions at Wellesley have important consequences on India’s solidarity economy.

-Amy, Maria, Maysa, Nirali

India and the World Transformed

Vandana Shiva is one of the most remarkable human beings that I have ever met. Her holistic approach to change for the globe (people and nature alike) is awe inspiring. But it is also very concrete. For my final project I wish to look at Vandana Shiva and her project Narvdanya and examine how it is possible for small efforts to make large change. I am particularly interested in how she has been able to integrate many different causes and perspectives and ideals without getting overwhelmed or spread too thin, rather in focusing on many intricately linked ideas (such as environment, politics, mental health, sustainability, and poverty) she has been able to help each more completely. I would like to highlight not only her and her work but some key points and ideas that have perhaps made her so good at what she does. That way she can be not only a heroine of our times but also a guide as to how we also might live our lives in a way that faces the problems of the world, tackles them, and is not bogged down by them. For it is not only her work that we can learn from- how she has gone about doing that work may very well be of equal importance.

ACE Environmental

I’m interested in research on ACE(alternatives for community and environment) because it combines two things I am very interested in – student/youth people activism and environmental justice.

ACE builds the power of communities of color and lower income communities in New England to eradicate environmental racism and classism and achieve environmental justice. We believe that everyone has the right to a healthy environment and to be decision-makers in issues affecting our communities. (http://www.ace-ej.org/about)

I’ve been interested in environmental justice since taking the class my first semester here at Wellesley. I’m also involved in a little bit of student activism here on campus, so I feel like I could learn some helpful strategies from this group. I’d also love to do this kind of organizing in my home-town someday, though perhaps for educational equality rather than environmental.

On the website, I’d like to share with people how they can get involved with ACE, and how ACE achieves it’s goals, and also maybe some case studies or stories about things ACE has accomplished in the last 10 years. I’d also like to tie ACE’s activities to the more global concept of Environmental Justice, and also to how students can be very active, despite how apathetic some see our generation as. I’d also like to connect this groups work to the green economy since this is an economics class!

Socially Responsible Corporations

The reason I switched to working on this topic was my interest in actually creating a list for CWS of socially responsible companies that Wellesley students might be interested in working at once they graduate. To me, this project could incorporate the Wellesley alumni network so we could see Wellesley alumni who are working at socially responsible companies.

I am pretty skeptical when it comes to corporations claiming to be socially responsible. We could explore techniques corporations use to construct an image of responsibility, true or not. I’ve always been interested in greenwashing and breaking down these strategies. Greenwashing was coined by New York environmentalist Jay Westerveld in an essay about the hotel industry’s practice of placing green placards in each room, promoting reuse of guest-towels, ostensibly to “save the environment”. Westerveld noted that, in most cases, little or no effort toward waste recycling was being implemented by these institutions, due in part to the lack of cost-cutting affected by such practice. Westerveld said that the actual objective of this “green campaign” on the part of many hoteliers was, in fact, increased profit. These sorts of things go on all the time, its a tricky idea to break down what companies are actually socially responsible vs. what companies are simply good at PR.

Small has problems too

This is something I have been wanting to write about since we had our class conversations about the role of the government versus the role of individuals and companies to promote and make social/environmental change. There was a sentiment was raised that the individual and small group projects allowed people a deeper connection, a truer connection, more individuality, and more choice in how they help. I think this is a very popular idea  in the United States: that it is better for each person to go out and found a charity in order to make the world better instead of the government controlling or demanding that we do go works. However having numerous small groups can (and do) cause all sorts of problems. Lets take Wellesley for example, everyone here wants leadership positions and so we have over 170 organizations that all have presidents and vice presidents but very few members and often don’t really accomplish that much. This happens in the world of non-profits with devastating consequence. Multiple groups with similar goals vie for limited funding and try to work with the same populations on the same things without working with each other. The end result of this is that some people get helped and others left out, some people get help they don’t need but not the help that they do need. Basically the “do gooders” own agendas and desire to be individuals and make their own organization instead of joining a larger one gets in the way of getting help to the people, animals, or enviroment that needs it. There are cases when I think that national or international supervision and organization would in the end be far more beneficial and make more positive change then individuals or groups of individuals.

LGBT Solidarity

Like Bailey, I am very intrigued by the current position of LGBT-run organizations and/or cooperatives in the Boston area.  On the one hand – do they exist and what types of businesses or causes are they supporting?  On the other hand – How do they factor into the overall economy of the city (how large and successful are they)?

After some research (which had to modified as I went along to really be able to find what I was looking for), I have at least been able to answer the first question; yes, they do exist, though they are few, and as Bailey mentioned, they are mostly in the form of bookstores and also cafes.  These two types of business would be interesting to investigate further, but I’m not sure it’s exactly what we’re looking for, as I don’t see as great of an overall impact on well-being in the economy being affected by these businesses.

The theater which Bailey discovered is a very unique idea and one that I think would provide a lot of useful information for our final project.  I would be very interested in looking into that further with her, and simultaneously exploring a subject (theater) that I currently know little about!

Casi Schwisow

4/22/2010