CHICAGO — A first-of-its-kind museum opened in Uptown earlier this month.
The Chicago Fair Trade Museum, located at 4704 North Broadway Street, opened just over a week ago and aims to highlight and educate people on fair trade, an alternative business model.
According to the Fair Trade Museum website, “fair trade aims to combat widespread poverty by providing opportunity for economically disadvantaged producers, cultivating transparent trade partnerships, ensuring safe working conditions and the rights of women and children, and focusing on environmental sustainability through all stages of production.”
Chicago Fair Trade was formed in 2006, and now it has a museum.
“We’re the first Fair Trade Museum in the world, right here in Chicago,” Nancy Demuth, Director of Engagement and Outreach for the Chicago Fair Trade Museum, says. “Fair trade is a way of doing business. It’s paying fair wages to workers (and) using environmentally-friendly production methods.”
Demuth highlighted a map in the museum that shows some of the common items people buy every day at the grocery store without a second thought.
Accompanying that map is this Martin Luther King Jr. quote: “Before you finished eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half the world.”
Adds Demuth: “We’re really just trying to shine a light on some of the products that we use and eat and wear every single day, and where they come from and what process it took to get them to us.”
Visit chicagofairtrade.org for more information about the museum and about fair trade.
