Who We Are

We began life as Southampton Fairtrade City Group in 2003, a broadly-based group campaigning to win Fairtrade City status for Southampton. We achieved this in 2004 and celebrated the award with festivities at the docks and in the city centre including the distribution and consumption of a consignment of Fairtrade bananas donated by producers in the Windward Islands, which had completed the last stage of their long journey by sailing boat to arrive in style at the Town Pier.

Since then we’ve campaigned to strengthen and extend Southampton’s Fairtrade City status. In this, we have been greatly helped by our relationship with the City Council, through the Fairtrade City Steering Group. We have enjoyed excellent support from both elected officers and Council officials, who have helped us to make new contacts and initiated activities with us.

Since 2003, we have organised a range of activities designed to make fair trade an important part of Southampton life. We've organised several successful conferences, designed not only to promote fair trade but also to explore debates within the movement; we’ve supported both of Southampton’s Universities in gaining Fairtrade University status; we’ve held public meetings; provided stalls at events; spoken to schools, churches and other organisations; and published a City Fairtrade Directory, updated in 2008 and again in 2009. Much of the research for the 2008 update was done by volunteers from the Philippines, under the Global Exchange scheme. We found it interesting and salutary to be on the receiving end of international aid.

In 2007 we adopted a revised constitution and a new name - Southampton Fair Trade Group. This was to indicate that, whilst maintaining Fairtrade City status is still an important part of our work, we also support organizations that promote fairly traded goods, but that for various valid reasons do not hold the FAIRTRADE Mark, although their fair trading credentials are still impeccable. We wanted also to signal the importance we give to promoting fair trade as part of the wider problem of general trade justice, interlinked with other world inequalities.

In 2010 we became a founder member of the Hampshire Fairtrade Network, which aims to gain Fairtrade County status for Hampshire. For more details of the Network and its aims, see http://www.fairtradeinhampshire. The Network is planning a formal launch later in 2011.

Membership of the Southampton Fair Trade Group is open to anyone who shares our aims, and our monthly business meetings are open to all members of the Group.

We work with and are supported by a wide range of organisations, whose concerns overlap clearly with our Trade Justice/Fair Trade focus. So our June 'Food for the Future' day was organised in collaboration with the local Women's Environmental Network, Transition Southampton, and Green Action. Sometimes, such collaboration generates requests for us to advertise other activities of these organisations on the website. Our policy is to support such events where they are clearly relevant to Trade Justice, and to send out information to our membership. However, in order to keep clear the website's focus on Trade Justice, we regret that we have to be selective about the events we post. Could you bear this in mind when you send us your information.

Current Officers:

• Chair: David Hoadley
• Vice-Chair: post currently vacant
• Secretary: Megan Streb
• Treasurer: Amna Bartholemew
• Membership Secretary: Amna Bartholomew
• Website Manager: Jane Freeland