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Fair trade and fellowship at Blessed Sacrament

By KARA KOCZUR, Globe staff reporter
(Email Kara)

Like many parishes, every now and then Blessed Sacrament in Sioux City has coffee and rolls following the weekend Masses.

A great time for fellowship, and a great time for a free breakfast, the peace and justice committee holds a parish coffee following all the Masses one weekend every other month. However, they don’t serve just any coffee. It’s fair trade coffee.

“The idea of fair trade is that these people produce their product and they get a fair price for it,” said Bernadette Rixner, a committee member. “Especially with coffee, the international market fluctuates so greatly that what the people get for growing the coffee just varies. They can’t count on it. Sometimes they’re not even able to live on what they’re getting for it.”

The people also are given the fair trade price at the time of production and don’t have to wait for their products to be sold on the international market, she added.

According to the Fair Trade Federation, a minimum of eight criteria must be met for a product to be considered fair trade: fair wage in the local context, opportunities for employee advancement, equal employment opportunities, environmentally sustainable practices, public accountability, long-term trade relationships, healthy and safe working conditions and financial and technical assistance to producers when possible.

The committee also sells the coffee, as well as fair trade tea and chocolate.

“What we’ve been doing is making the actual coffee we’ve been selling,” said Rixner. “We make a light and a dark so that people can try [them] and see what they like and if they want to buy it they’re welcome to.”
People seem to be enjoying the coffee, she said, and keep coming back for more.

This isn’t Blessed Sacrament’s first exposure to fair trade items. Up until this past fall, the committee had held an annual fair trade craft sale through Work of Human Hands, a Catholic Relief Services program that started in 1995. However, this year it decided to commit to the bi-monthly coffees instead, with three goals in mind, Rixner said.

“One was to provide parish coffees and times of fellowship,” she said. “The second one was to get people more familiar with fair trade, let them try the fair trade coffees and make them available to them. The third thing was that we use these coffees [to] put out some of the peace and justice information.”

So far the committee has provided information about fair trade, peace and justice activities, Operation Rice Bowl and the Refugee Cross.

The coffee, tea and chocolate also come from Work of Human Hands. The coffee is grown in Costa Rica, while the chocolate – dark, milk, white and hazelnut – comes from Ghana.

“What’s interesting to me is that we have happily developed some repeat customers, especially for the dark coffee [and] some people love the chocolate,” she said.

Parishioner Molly Joly is one of those repeat customers. She has attended the parish coffees and said she buys coffee every time. Light roast for herself and one to two bags of dark roast for her father.

“It’s good coffee and good chocolate,” Joly said. “It’s reasonably priced. Sometimes fair trade coffee is ridiculously expensive. In my opinion it has to have a reasonable price on it and that one does.”

Ronnie Luke buys all her coffee, tea and Easter chocolate at Blessed Sacrament. Buying fair trade items is very important to Luke, who travels to area fair trade stores for other items and orders Christmas gifts through the Work of Human Hands catalog.

“The money actually goes to the people and not a corporation,” said Luke, a Blessed Sacrament parishioner. “Years ago I got to go down to Guatemala and see some of the co-ops and see some of the people and it’s actually supporting people and their livelihood.”

Both Luke and Joly said they enjoy the fellowship at the bi-monthly coffees, though Joly wishes more people would take advantage of them.

“I’ve always liked the idea of parish coffees or coffee and doughnuts after church,” she added. “I just think it’s a really welcoming occasion for both new members and long-time members of the parish.”

Still, Rixner said the attendance is good. The committee has only committed to a year of doing the coffees, so come this fall it will have to decide if the coffees are worth continuing.

Until then, the parish will continue gathering for fellowship and fair trade. The next coffee is scheduled for Pentecost, May 31.

“Instead of having rolls,” Rixner said, “we’re going to have birthday cake since it’s the birthday of the church.”