Manhattan College is a fairly small school with students hailing from a wide variety of demographics. On campus, interest in food reform happens to be concentrated within a very small minority of students. Fortunate to have found each other at all, our little Fair Trade/Food Reform coalition decided, upon organizing, that gaining public appeal and educating our peers would be our first challenge.
After meeting with our food service managers, representatives of Sodexho, we learned that to make any change in our dining halls it would have to first be made clear that it was the popular opinion of the students, their costumers. So, we began by setting camp outside the dining halls, providing literature on Fair Trade, personally delivering brief definitions to new terms, and handing out Divine chocolates, for free. This step was absolutely necessary and perhaps the most challenging because, like most Americans living in cities, my fellow students had been trained to simply accept a finished, packaged product, and not wonder about the steps of production. But I believe we successfully piqued the curiosity of the students by appealing to their pockets, their health, their taste buds, and their conscience. We also showed documentaries and hosted open mic nights on campus during which we interjected facts about the injustices of some free trade practices, and how Fair Trade works.
After this, we handed out Sodexho comment cards, encouraging the students to demand their rights as costumers and ask Sodexho to provide more Fair Trade and organic goods, beginning with coffee. We collected hundreds of comment cards, delivered them to the managers, and informed them that the people had spoken. Our managers were surprisingly responsive and by the following semester we had all Fair Trade, Organic coffee on campus. Additionally, we had gained a voice on campus and a relationship with Sodexho and have continued to simultaneously communicate with the students and Sodexho about achieving a more healthy, just, sustainable food service on campus.
[...] July 24, 2008 · No Comments http://organiconthegreen.wordpress.com/2008/07/24/public-appeal [...]
I’m curious how students responded to the materials you distributed outside the dining halls. Do you think it was the free samples of fair-trade organic chocolate, informational brochures, defining the term, or a combination that was most effective. Did you ask people to fill out the feedback forms on the spot or later on?
How have the rest of you succeeded in educating your student body about your topic of choice???
I think the chocolate definitely helped. It’s always difficult to be in the situation where you are asking people to give their free time and energy to listen. Some people were genuinely interested. The comment cards were right there, which was a necessary move. People seemed to enjoy excercising this sort of democratic practice of filling out the cards, and not only did we acheive our goal in this way of getting the coffee, we also, at the very least, put Fair Trade into the vocabulary of students.
im lookin g for an intership, i´m a agriculture student from BRASIL university of s. paulo esalq living at metropolis X rainforest