How did the Fair Trade movement get started?

How did the Fair Trade movement get started?

The Fair Trade movement is consumer-based, and it was people who saw the opportunity to make a difference and wanted to take the opportunity to take action. For Ten Thousand Villages, it started with a woman named Edna Ruth Byler, who was working in Puerto Rico and was at a school where they were teaching sewing, and she saw the beautiful things, the beautiful needlework that they were doing and saw the potential to bring that stuff back to the U.S. and to sell it. She began by bringing needlework from Puerto Rico and soon she had the woodwork from Haiti and other kinds of handmade items from different places. She started by selling them out of the trunk of her car after she had returned from these trips. She was working on selling the stuff and making sure the workers were being paid fairly, ensuring that money was going back to them. That idea of direct trade, that is behind Fair Trade, really started with people who made the initiative to make that trade direct, by the experiences they were having in different places. Edna Ruth Bylers is a great example of that - the idea of Fair Trade, and that an individual can make a difference just by taking action.