Wilfrid Laurier University Earns Fair Trade Designation

Every student understands the importance of coffee. For many, it’s the only thing that gets them up in the morning and keeps them going late at night. And now there’s good news for all those coffee drinkers at Wilfrid Laurier University. Just last week, the school was officially designated as a fair trade campus by Fairtrade Canada.

It took Wilfrid Laurier more than a year to make the designation happen. The first step was to create the kind of committee at the school and to take inventory of all the food sold on campus including coffee, tea and chocolate. The committee then had to discover if the school met the minimum requirements required by fair trade: that 100 percent of the coffee sold on campus be fair trade, that each food outlet offered three tea options and that one chocolate is offered.

“When we talk to the student body about sustainability issues, food consistently is top of mind,” Tyler Plante, outreach and program coordinator in Laurier’s Sustainability Office, told CBC News. “It’s something that is very tangible because they need to eat every day and we drink a lot of coffee and that’s one of the main focus areas of fair trade. That’s really why we chose [a] fair trade campus as one of the avenues we’d go down.”

However, getting Wilfrid Laurier to become a fair trade university was only the first step. The next was to make sure that students were aware of all the options and what it means to be fair trade. For the school, being fair trade is a way to send a message about purchasing power and making a positive impact.

“Our students are passionate and knowledgeable about food when they arrive on our campuses,” said Corrie Bird, the marketing and communications manager with Aramark—the school’s food service provider. “We want to support and ignite this passion with the continued education and discussion of our fair trade practices.”

And being fair trade for their coffee, tea, and chocolate is just the tip of the bucket for Wilfrid Laurier. The school continually asks for feedback from its students on what more they can do from selling fair trade bananas to offering fair trade Hawks gear.

Wilfrid Laurier is one of about twenty schools in Canada to have the trade designation and only the second in the area.

regions: Toronto

About the Author