This Sounds Amazing!

Developing nation artisans have an opportunity to enjoy fair compensation for their labor and craft. Catholic Relief Service's Work of Human hands helps them cut out the middlemen!

The Catholic Telegraph of Cinncinati has the story here.

Take a closer look:

Work of Human Hands is a partnership between CRS and A Greater Gift, formerly known as SERRV International. It promotes economic justice for low-income artisans overseas and advances an alternative approach to international trade through the sale of fairly traded handcrafts.

"Under the conventional trading system, low-income artisans in less-developed countries work long hours to produce goods for consumers in wealthy nations but often earn less than $1 a day. The big profits go to the brokers, importers and retailers who rely on a system that pays low wages to producers and charges high prices to consumers," CRS information explains.

Work of Human Hands is part of a Fair Trade movement that offers a clear and just alternative to that conventional system, because it is based on direct relationships with low-income producers overseas.

A consignment sale of products is a way to eliminate the intermediaries and guarantee artisans a fair price for their products, access to credit and training and the stability of long-term relationships rooted in the principles of mutual respect and economic justice. In addition to handcrafted items, the sale of Fair Trade coffee is also a growing movement.

At St. Albert’s consignment sale last year, for example, "we ordered $10,000 worth of items and raised $8,000," said Cheryl Griffin, who, with Susie Hogue, both parishioners at St. Albert the Great Parish, coordinated the sale through the sponsorship of the Kettering church.

This year the church is doing it again with new partnerships — Catholic Social Action Office, Bergamo Center for Lifelong Learning and the Dayton Deanery Social Justice Collaborative, whose motto is "Weavers of Justice: Doing Together What We Can’t Do Alone."

"This year the sale will have $55,000 worth of products," she said.

Fools come together to give hard-working skilled craftsman an opportunity to sell their own creations and earn just compensation for their effort. Consumers get to enjoy authentic crafts at a reasonable price, without all of the loads to the middlemen so common in retail these days. I'm not seeing a downside here.

Funny: a Catholic organization manages to promote social justice without income redistribution or coercive nanny statism. It also manages to promote Catholic Social Teaching without the hysterical attention the media pays the pelvic issues when covering Catholicism. Whoa! Color me Foolish, but I believe I see subsidiarity and compassion in action. Simultaneously. With nary a bureacrat in sight.

How refreshing!