Students filled the Mayer Campus Center on Friday for the third annual OneWorld Global Crafts Bazaar, which featured fair−trade crafts and products from around the globe.
The event was designed to unite many campus student groups behind a common project in order to address global poverty issues and highlight innovative solutions to global inequalities, according to OneWorld President Marla Spivack. She added that the event raised over $3,000.
The profits of the bazaar will be donated to GoodWeave, a non−profit organization that inspects rug−manufacturing facilities in India and Nepal to ensure that no child labor is used in the production of their rugs, according to Spivack, a senior. She added that the organization places any children they find in the manufacturing facilities in school or day care.
The bazaar featured goods such as beaded jewelry made by women in Uganda, handmade scarves, hats and gloves and fair−trade coffee and chocolate from countries around the world.
Many of the crafts sold were provided by larger organizations, such as SERRV and Ten Thousand Villages, groups that gather and sell crafts from many smaller non−profit companies in order to make fair trade goods accessible to consumers on a large scale, according to Spivack and senior Dahlia Norry, an executive member of OneWorld.
The theme of this year's bazaar was socially responsible consumption; previous years have centered on themes such as women and youth empowerment, according to Spivack.
"We are hoping to educate the community about ways to be a socially responsible consumer, and that means education about fair trade," she said.
Norry hopes visitors learned more about how to engage in socially responsible consumption by purchasing fair−trade crafts and learning about the people and communities that created them.
Co−sponsoring student groups, including Tufts Hillel, the Tisch Civic Engagement Fund and the Office for Campus Life manned booths at the event in order to share messages about their activities.
"We have all these student groups there to provide ways for students to take action after the bazaar," Norry added. "It's about how to take on a new part of your lifestyle."
Groups under the umbrella of the Tufts Sustainability Collective (TSC), which this year partnered with OneWorld to put on the Global Crafts Bazaar, had several educational booths where they discussed with visitors the five steps toward becoming a socially responsible consumer: buy Fair Trade, buy sustainable, read the label, vote with your dollar and talk about it.
The group was able to highlight the social and economic aspects of sustainability through the bazaar, according to TSC co−Directors junior Katy Kidwell and senior Jibade Sandiford.
"Us working with OneWorld is showing how multi−faceted sustainability is," Sandiford said.
