Even before the disaster, there had been only 108,000 landbased telephone lines in the country, compared with 3.5 million mobile phones. After the earthquake, mobile communications, particularly text messages, were one of the few means by which people could report their needs and location. Around those calls for help coalesced a community of techno-humanitarian volunteers using computer software that helped turn text messages into a real-time online disaster map, usable by rescue workers and aid organizations.

Foremost among the volunteer groups was Ushahidi, an organization founded two years earlier by four tech-savvy activists frustrated by a lack of mainstream Kenyan media coverage of the country’s postelection violence. But while Ushahidi (Swahili for “testimony” or “witness”) and its mapping platform had been used elsewhere, Haiti marked their big-stage debut. Within days of the Haiti earthquake, the platform was customized and a text message hotline set up. Hundreds of volunteers from around the world processed texted reports of trapped people, medical emergencies, and requests for aid, feeding the reports into a map that rescue workers could use. A total of 1,500 reports were gathered and mapped in the first two weeks, and more than 3,500 created altogether.

Since that time, some 17,000 maps have been made, some with the help of Ushahidi’s personnel and volunteer community, but most by people unconnected with the organization. The maps have chronicled everything from political violence in Africa to calamitous weather in New York and neighborhood news in Sydney. In principle, the potential uses are almost infinite.

“When we originally drew up our first mind maps of the different stakeholders, we figured that some organizations and journalists and NGOs might use it. We couldn’t have envisioned what would happen today,” says Ushahidi co-founder Juliana Rotich.

The platform has by no means become mainstream. And back in January 2010, only some Haitians and a few on-the-ground workers knew about it. But hundreds of people were adding to the maps and at least some government personnel were paying attention. Patrick Meier, Ushahidi’s director of crisis mapping, recounted, “On the third day [after the earthquake], FEMA (the US government’s Federal Emergency Management Agency) called us to say keep mapping no matter what people say—it’s saving lives.” This social activism approach revealed the essence of Ushahidi’s model. Though the nonprofit is nominally tech focused, its activism is less about building technology than building community. “One thing we’ve realized,” says Rotich, “is that the platform is just 10 to 15 percent of the solution.”

CLOSING THE LOOP

Of course, technology isn’t unimportant. Without that 10 to 15 percent, as represented by the code that ultimately turns instruction and information into maps, the organization wouldn’t exist. So when Rotich and three co-founders started Ushahidi, they didn’t build a tool from scratch, but decided to combine the abilities of simple, widespread tools: mobile phones, databases, and online maps.

In those early days, before anyone else would help them, they relied on a programming technique called agile development. “You just jumped in,” says Rotich. “If something needed to be done, you did it. If e-mails needed to be answered, you answered. Until you could set up the system, you just did it.” Having a dedicated core group was a necessary precursor to building their first volunteer community: software programmers.

Inspired by WordPress, Firefox, and Redhat Linux, software packages built on open-source—publicly available—code and developed by far-flung communities of volunteer programmers, Ushahidi asked the programming community for help. As Ushahidi developed its platform, a coder named rabble was especially important. He posted scathing critiques of Ushahidi’s methods in its online forums. “Some of us were very new at the time. We didn’t know best practices; rabble called us out,” says Rotich. “We responded and said, ‘Sorry, we’ll do what we can to fix that.’” Without that responsiveness, Ushahidi would never have been able to engage the 125 programmers who have maintained and refined its software package, which has been translated into no fewer than 16 languages.

Another community of volunteers helps during Ushahidi mapping deployments. In Haiti, those volunteers were responsible for customizing the software to local needs and manually processing each texted report. Many were also Haitian emigrants in Boston, where Meier was a student at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Recruited largely through social media tools, the Haitian diaspora community was essential, translating both the Creole language and locale-specific references unfamiliar to foreigners.

“You need to have in your partnership someone who understands the context,” says Rotich. It was a lesson they’d learned in 2009 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where—unlike Kenya, the country where Rotich was raised—Ushahidi had little knowledge of local circumstances, and mapping faltered for lack of on-the-ground support and participation.

“That galvanization of such huge communities in such a short period of time is really impressive, and really inspiring,” says Catherine Dempsey, a research consultant at PAX, a nonprofit organization developing an Ushahidi map for spotting early warning signs of social unrest in southern Africa.

In Haiti, Ushahidi also contacted Haitian telecommunications companies that provided technical assistance in setting up a hotline and media outlets that announced it. But they didn’t fully engage with one essential community: humanitarian workers. People in a position to use their maps didn’t always know about them, and those who knew didn’t necessarily find them useful. “We had extremely limited engagement with crisis mappers and volunteer efforts,” says Andrej Verity, an information manager with the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs who saw Ushahidi’s map but found it impracticable. “I was sent a link to the crisis map based on Ushahidi. I open it up, and it’s got a bunch of red circles on it. With the amount of information that was being thrown at me, working 18 to 20 hours a day, it didn’t do anything for me.”

Verity’s experience was far from universal, but it underscored Haiti’s chief lesson for the organization: the importance of building relationships with the people who ultimately could use the volunteers’ maps and of hearing their criticism as well. In Haiti’s aftermath, Ushahidi and other members of the crowdsourced mapping community worked closely with Verity and established aid groups, setting up protocols and working groups that could better provide the type of data they needed. To help ensure that the volunteer effort catalyzed by Haiti’s earthquake could be replicated elsewhere in the future, Ushahidi also helped set up the Standby Task Force, an Ushahidi-independent mapping community of trained volunteers who can participate immediately after a crisis, before a larger community assembles.

The tangible impact of these improvements remains to be seen, but the potential was enough for Verity to invite Ushahidi’s collaboration as the Libyan civil war intensified in March 2011. “The mappers really wanted to learn from the humanitarian community. They were willing to listen,” said Verity, who went on to echo Rotich’s assessment about its utility. “Ushahidi itself is the technical component, which is 10 to 20 percent of the larger solution,” said Verity. “You need to figure out how you are going to build your community.”

USHAHIDI 2.0

Ushahidi’s work with the United Nations is, for the moment, unpaid, and about 80 percent of the organization’s budget comes from foundation support, which started with a crucial $200,000 grant from Humanity United in 2008. Since then, the staff has expanded from Rotich and her three co-founders to a total of 14 employees. Other supporters include the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation, and the Omidyar Network, which in 2009 gave the nonprofit $1.4 million. The other 20 percent of Ushahidi’s budget comes from fee-based consulting projects, with customers currently including the ICT4Peace Foundation and the World Bank.

Rotich characterizes these consultancies as early stage. As with its U.N. work, Ushahidi must establish its maps’ real power and utility. Rotich also acknowledges that Ushahidi has had a great start in part due to media coverage. Nick Martin, president of activist technology training provider TechChange, has described Ushahidi as “the darling child of the tech crisis space.” Indeed, after Haiti, the organization received glowing press coverage, with some journalists hailing their work as revolutionary. Such praise made Ushahidi a household word, but only for about 15 minutes.

Rotich’s advice to nonprofits working at the intersection of technology, global aid, and social justice is to find staff with diverse expertise who can successfully work together and with volunteers. “People fall in love with a prototype, not an idea,” she says. “As much as possible, make sure your team has a good technologist who can prototype the idea you’re working on.” Equally important is storytelling: Keep a blog, use Twitter, and “share the journey of what you’re creating.” Ask for help, too: Encourage people to participate with whatever skills they have. That helps an organization immediately and helps create a community of people who spread the word about their work.

“We did not have an advertising budget,” Rotich says. “We still do not.”

Brandon Keim is a freelance journalist and associate editor of Wired Science based in Brooklyn, N.Y., and Bangor, Maine. In previous SSIR articles he’s written about green building, Indian environmentalism, the global coffee trade, and urban transportation development.

Dobbin and colleagues examined a national sample of 816 firms from 1980 to 2002, and found that corporate culture, women in management, and industry norms do more to drive the adoption of diversity programs than does actual need. Companies tend not to respond to regulatory scrutiny or to a lack of racial or ethnic diversity in the workforce. What does lead them to adopt programs, such as diversity training, mentoring, and task forces, is a history of having embraced new social norms in the past, as evidenced by by their progressive work-family practices. Those firms also tend to promote women into management, who then advocate for further diversity.

Peer pressure is an alternative force. “Every firm wants to make sure it remains competitive for the best talent, and seeing what other firms do is a huge motivator for change,” says Caroline Simard, vice president of research and executive programs at the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology. But surprisingly, Dobbin found that external and internal pressures don’t reinforce each other. Only one or the other matters; a firm that already resisted adopting a popular industry program won’t be swayed by higher numbers of female managers.

“I think we can now understand why the economy begins to look like it’s dividing into firms that are very pro-diversity and firms that just never seem to get out of a rut,” says Dobbin. “One of the reasons is that if you’ve made some progress, there’s support for further progress.”

Another problem is that although white women managers are promoting diversity programs, they often promote the wrong ones. Employers spend the most money on one program—diversity training—that has been shown by several studies not to work. Mentoring is more effective, but white women managers tend not to institute it. Minority managers might also champion diversity program adoption, but the researchers couldn’t tell, because there still aren’t enough minorities in management.

“I think we would probably be in a better place if all these firms were required to take some of the steps we know are effective at reducing inequality,” says Dobbin. “It would be useful if the federal government would take a clearer stand on what policies and programs firms need to put into place.”

Frank Dobbin, Soohan Kim, and Alexandra Kalev, “You Can’t Always Get What You Need: Organizational Determinants of Diversity Programs,” American Sociological Review, 76, 2011.

A new study calls that comfortable conclusion into question. “The collapse of compassion is an active process,” says Daryl Cameron, a doctoral candidate in social psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “It’s not some passive limitation on human experience. It’s the end result of an active choice not to feel something.”

Cameron designed a series of experiments to find out why four people in pain don’t get quadruple the sympathy of one. In one test, he had 60 college students read about one, four, or eight children from Darfur. The students who said they were better at regulating their emotions—who don’t easily lose focus or control, and usually know how to make themselves feel better—reported being less upset by multiple Darfur children in crisis than by one. In another experiment, different students reading about these same children were told either to let themselves fully experience their emotions or to think objectively and be detached. Again, those who proactively regulated their emotions showed a collapse of compassion when viewing eight victims compared to one.

This suggests that people are perfectly capable of responding emotionally to groups. They just steel themselves against it. “If you really took everything to heart, to the full magnitude that all these disasters truly deserve, you’d probably be sitting home rocking yourself in a closet all day,” says Elizabeth Dunn, a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia who was not involved in the research. “We need to be able to cope.”

Our capacity to empathize with a large number of people is good news for disaster relief, says Cameron. “If it is a choice, rather than a constraint, then we can try to get people to decide differently what they want to feel, and toward whom.” The bad news is that we seem to care only when we don’t have to act. Cameron’s other experiment compared students who had been prompted with the idea of a donation with students who hadn’t. “When people did not expect to have to help on the basis of their emotions, they experienced more emotion toward eight victims than toward one victim,” he says. Opening your heart is a lot easier when there’s no expected cost.

C. Daryl Cameron and B. Keith Payne, “Escaping Affect: How Motivated Emotion Regulation Creates Insensitivity to Mass Suffering,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 2011.

Giuliano originally embraced the Fair Trade-certification model—which pays producers an above-market “fair trade” price provided they meet specific labor, environmental, and production standards—because he believed it was the best way to empower growers and drive the sustainable development of one of the world’s largest commodities. Today, Giuliano no longer purchases Fair Trade-certified coffee for his business. “I think fair trade as a concept is very relevant,” says Giuliano. But “I think the Fair Trade-certified FLO model is not relevant at all and kind of never has been, because they were doing something different than they were selling to the consumer. … That’s exactly why I left TransFair [now Fair Trade USA]. They’re selling a different thing than they’re producing.”

Giuliano is among a growing group of coffee growers, roasters, and importers who believe that Fair Trade-certified coffee is not living up to its chief promise to reduce poverty. Retailers explain that neither FLO—the Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International umbrella group—nor Fair Trade USA, the American standards and certification arm of FLO, has sufficient data showing positive economic impact on growers. Yet both nonprofits state that their mission is to “use a market-based approach that empowers farmers to get a fair price for their harvest, helps workers create safe working conditions, provides a decent living wage, and guarantees the right to organize.”¹ (In this article, the term Fair Trade coffee refers to coffee that has been certified as “Fair Trade” by FLO or Fair Trade USA; the term Fair Trade refers to the certification model of FLO and Fair Trade USA; and the term fair trade refers to the movement to improve the lives of growers and other producers through trade.)

FLO rules cover artisans and farmers who produce not just coffee but also a variety of goods, including tea, cocoa, bananas, sugar, honey, rice, flowers, cotton, and even sports balls. Its certification process requires producing organizations to comply with a set of minimum standards “designed to support the sustainable development of small-scale producers and agricultural workers in the poorest countries in the world.” ² These standards—31 pages of general and product-specific standards—detail member farm size, electoral processes and democratic organization, contractual transparency and reporting, and environmental standards, to name only a few. Supporting organizations, such as Fair Trade USA, in Oakland, Calif., ensure that the product is properly handled, labeled, and marketed in the consuming country.

Like many economic and political movements, the fair trade movement arose to address the perceived failure of the market and remedy important social issues. As the name implies, Fair Trade has sought not only to protect farmers but also to correct the legacy of the colonial mercantilist system and the kind of crony capitalism where large businesses obtain special privileges from local governments, preventing small businesses from competing and flourishing. To its credit, Fair Trade USA has played a significant role in getting American consumers to pay more attention to the economic plight of poor coffee growers. Although Fair Trade coffee still accounts for only a small fraction of overall coffee sales, the market for Fair Trade coffee has grown markedly over the last decade, and purchases of Fair Trade coffee have helped improve the lives of many small growers.

Despite these achievements, the system by which Fair Trade USA hopes to achieve its ends is seriously flawed, limiting both its market potential and the benefits it provides growers and workers. Among the concerns are that the premiums paid by consumers are not going directly to farmers, the quality of Fair Trade coffee is uneven, and the model is technologically outdated. This article will examine why, over the past 20 years, Fair Trade coffee has evolved from an economic and social justice movement to largely a marketing model for ethical consumerism—and why the model persists regardless of its limitations.

THE ORIGINS OF FAIR TRADE

The idea of fair trade has been around since people first started exchanging goods with one another. The history of trade has shown, however, that exchange has not always been fair. The mercantile system that dominated Western Europe from the 16th to the late 18th century was a nationalistic system intended to enrich the state. Businesses, such as the Dutch East India Company, operating for the benefit of the mother country in “the colonies,” were afforded monopoly privileges and protected from local competition by tariffs. Under these circumstances, trade was anything but fair. Local workers often were compelled through force—slavery or indentured servitude—to work long hours under terrible conditions. In the 1940s and 1950s, nongovernmental and religious organizations, such as Ten Thousand Villages and SERRV International, attempted to create supply chains that were fair to producers, mostly creators of handicrafts. In the 1960s, the fair trade movement began to take shape, along with the criticism that industrialized countries and multinational corporations were using their power for further enrichment to the detriment of poorer counties and producers, particularly of agricultural products like coffee.

Adding to these perceived economic imbalances is the cyclical nature of the coffee business. As an agricultural product that is sensitive to growing conditions and temperature fluctuations, coffee is subject to exaggerated boom-bust cycles. Booms occur when farm output is low, causing price increases due to limited supply; bust cycles occur when there is a bumper crop, causing price declines due to large supply. Price stabilization is an objective commonly sought by less-developed countries through commodity agreements. Thus the International Commodity Agreement (ICA) evolved as a means to stabilize the chronic price fluctuations and endemic instability of the coffee industry. The first of these agreements arose in the 1940s to provide stability during wartime, when the European markets were unavailable to Latin American producers.

After the war, a boom in coffee demand made renewal of the agreement unnecessary. But during the late 1950s, down cycles threatened economies once again. The ICA essentially was little more than a cartel agreement between the member countries (coffee producers) to restrict output during bust periods to maintain higher prices, storing the surplus beans to sell later when output was low. Because the US government was concerned about the spread of communism in Latin America, it supported the cartel by enforcing import restrictions. In 1989, however, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the waning of communist influence, the United States lost interest in supporting the agreement and withdrew. Without US enforcement, the cartel fell prey to rampant cheating on the part of its members and eventually dissolved. Attempts have since been made to resurrect the cartel—but though it exists in name, it remains largely ineffective.

Recognizing the dire circumstances confronting farmers during the late 1980s, when the price of coffee once again plunged, fair trade activists formulated a system whereby farmers could obtain access to international markets and reasonable reward for their labor. In 1988 a coalition of those economic justice activists created the first fair trade certification initiative in the Netherlands, called Max Havelaar, after a fictional Dutch character who opposed the exploitation of coffee farmers by Dutch colonialists in the East Indies. The organization created a label for products that met certain wage standards. Other similar organizations arose within Europe, eventually merging in 1997 to create FLO, based in Bonn, Germany, which today sets the Fair Trade-certification standards and serves to inspect and certify the producer organizations.

ETHICAL CONSUMERISM

Why do we care about fairly traded coffee? One reason is the importance of coffee to the economies of the countries in which the crop is grown. Coffee is the second most valuable commodity exported from developing countries, petroleum being the first. For many of the world’s least developed countries, such as Honduras, Ethiopia, and Guatemala, coffee exports make up an enormous share of the export earnings, comprising in some cases more than 50 percent of foreign exchange earnings.³ In addition, many of the coffee growers are small and their businesses are financially marginal.

Although some of the world’s poorest countries produce coffee, the preponderance of that production is consumed by the citizens of the world’s wealthiest countries. The United States is the world’s single largest consuming country, buying more than 22 percent of world coffee imports; the combined countries of the European Union import roughly 67 percent, ⁴ with other countries importing the remaining 10 percent. According to the Specialty Coffee Retailer, an industry resource site, specialty coffee in 2010 accounted for $13.65 billion in sales, one-third of the nation’s $40 billion coffee industry. The Specialty Coffee Association of America reports that approximately 23 million people in the United States drink specialty or gourmet coffee daily. Fair Trade coffee, which has grown steadily from 76,059 pounds in 1998 to 109,795,363 pounds in 2009,⁵ constitutes only about 4 percent of that $14 billion market.

The primary way in by which FLO and Fair Trade USA attempt to alleviate poverty and jump-start economic development among coffee growers is a mechanism called a price floor, a limit on how low a price can be charged for a product. As of March 2011, FLO fixed a price floor of $1.40 per pound of green coffee beans. FLO also indexes that floor to the New York Coffee Exchange price, so that when prices rise above $1.40 per pound for commodity, or non-specialty, coffee, the Fair Trade price paid is always at least 20 cents per pound higher than the price for commodity coffee.

Commodity coffee is broken into grades, but within each grade the coffee is standardized. This means that beans from one batch are assumed to be identical to those in any other batch. It is a standardized product. Specialty coffee, on the other hand, is sold because of its distinctive flavor characteristics. Because specialty coffees are of a higher grade, they command higher prices. Fair Trade coffee can come in any quality grade, but the coffee is considered part of the specialty coffee market because of its special production requirements and pricing structure. It is these requirements and pricing structure that create a quality problem for Fair Trade coffee.

To understand how the problem arises, one must understand that the low consumer demand for Fair Trade coffee means that not all of a particular farmer’s coffee, which will be of varying quality, may be sold at the Fair Trade price. The rest must be sold on the market at whatever price the quality of the coffee will support.

A simple example illustrates this point. A farmer has two bags of coffee to sell and there is a Fair Trade buyer for only one bag. The farmer knows bag A would be worth $1.70 per pound on the open market because the quality is high and bag B would be worth only $1.20 because the quality is lower. Which should he sell as Fair Trade coffee for the guaranteed price of $1.40? If he sells bag A as Fair Trade, he earns $1.40 (the Fair Trade price) and sells bag B for $1.20 (the market price), equaling $2.60. If he sells bag B as Fair Trade coffee he earns $1.40, and sells bag A at the market price for $1.70, he earns a total of $3.10. To maximize his income, therefore, he will choose to sell his lower quality coffee as Fair Trade coffee. Also, if the farmer knows that his lower quality beans can be sold at $1.40 per pound (provided there is demand), he may decide to increase his income by reallocating his resources to boost the quality of some beans over others. For example, he might stop fertilizing one group of plants and concentrate on improving the quality of the others. Thus the chances increase that the Fair Trade coffee will be of consistently lower quality. This problem is accentuated when the price of coffee rises to 30-year highs, as it has done recently.

One of the unique characteristics of the FLO and Fair Trade USA model is that only certain types of growers can qualify for certification—specifically, small growers who do not rely on permanent hired labor and belong to democratically run cooperatives. This means that private estate farmers and multinational companies like Kraft or Nestlé that grow their own coffee cannot be certified as Fair Trade coffee, even if they pay producers well, help create environmentally sustainable and organic products, and build schools and medical clinics for grower communities.

Although the cooperative requirement may seem unusual, it follows logically from the experience of Paul Rice, founder and president of Fair Trade USA. Rice spent most of the early 1980s working with cooperative farmers in Latin America, studying and implementing training programs for small farmer organizations on behalf of the Nicaragua Agrarian Reform Ministry under the Sandinista administration. In 1990, he became the first CEO of prodecoop, a fair trade organic cooperative representing almost 3,000 small coffee farmers in northern Nicaragua. Then in 1998, he founded Fair Trade USA. Rice sees cooperatives as the key to the empowerment of the independent coffee farmer, providing a union-like type of collective bargaining power that enables cooperative leaders to negotiate pricing for the individual members.

Membership in a cooperative is a requirement of Fair Trade regulations. Another core element is the premium—the subsidy (now 20 cents per pound) paid by purchasers to ensure economic and environmental sustainability. Premiums are retained by the cooperative and do not pass directly to farmers. Instead, the farmers vote on how the premium is to be spent for their collective use. They may decide to use it to upgrade the milling equipment of a cooperative, improve irrigation, or provide some community benefit, such as medical or educational facilities.

Fair Trade USA is a nonprofit, but an unusually sustainable one. It gets most of its revenues from service fees from retailers. For every pound of Fair Trade coffee sold in the United States, retailers must pay 10 cents to Fair Trade USA. That 10 cents helps the organization promote its brand, which has led some in the coffee business to say that Fair Trade USA is primarily a marketing organization. In 2009, the nonprofit had a budget of $10 million, 70 percent of which was funded by fees. The remaining 30 percent came from philanthropic contributions, mostly from foundation grants and private donors.

People in the coffee industry find it hard to criticize FLO and Fair Trade USA, because of its mission “to empower family farmers and workers around the world, while enriching the lives of those struggling in poverty” and to create wider conditions for sustainable development, equity, and environmental responsibility.⁶ “I’m hook, line, and sinker for the Fair Trade mission,” says Shirin Moayyad, director of coffee purchasing for Peet’s Coffee & Tea Inc. “When I read [the statement], I thought, there’s nothing I disagree with here. Everything here I believe in.” Yet Moayyad has concerns about the effectiveness of the model, mostly because she does not see FLO making progress toward those goals.

Whole Foods Market initially rejected the Fair Trade model. The supermarket chain only recently began buying Fair Trade coffee, through its private label coffee, Allegro, in response to the demand from their consumers. Jeff Teter, president of Allegro Coffee, a specialty coffee business begun in 1985 and sold to Whole Foods in 1997, said that his main concern has been the quality of Fair Trade coffee. “To get great quality coffee, you pay the market price. Now, in our instance, it’s a lot more than what the Fair Trade floor prices are,” he says. As for social justice for coffee growers, Teter responds: “We were living the model at least 10 years before Paul Rice and TransFair people got started here in America. … Paul Rice and his group have done an amazing job convincing a small group of vocal and active consumers in America to be suspicious of anybody who isn’t FT.” Rice disagrees, arguing, “Fair Trade is the only certification program today that ensures and proves that farmers are getting more money.”

AN IMPERFECT MODEL

My field and analytical research has found that there are distinct limitations to the Fair Trade model.⁷ Perhaps the most serious challenge is the extraordinarily high price of coffee. “The market today is five times higher than when FLO entered the United States. The market’s at $2.50 (per pound for commodity coffee) today vs. the 40 cents or 50 cents (per pound) it was at in 2001,” says Dennis Macray, former director of global sustainability at Starbucks Coffee Co. This price shift dampens farmers’ desire to sell their high-quality coffee at the Fair Trade price. Many co-ops, according to Macray, are choosing to default on the Fair Trade contracts, so that they can do better for their members by selling on the open market. Macray, who is now an independent sustainability consultant with clients such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, says the default problem is seriously compounded by the perceptions of quality. Some roasters express concern that the quality of Fair Trade coffee is not at the same high levels as other types of specialty coffee sold alongside it. “For some cooperatives the Fair Trade price became the ceiling, not the floor. … Many Fair Trade buyers do not see a reason why they should pay any more than the fair trade price for the value that is Fair Trade,” explains Macray.

In the past, coffee growers were often isolated in remote regions and had little access to market information on the value of their product. Unscrupulous buyers might offer only very low prices, taking advantage of farmers’ lack of information. Today, however, growers have access to coffee price fluctuations on their cell phones and, in many cases, have a keener understanding of how to negotiate with foreign distributors to get the best price per pound. In addition, the growing demand for very high quality coffee has led to a tremendous increase in the number of buyers traveling to more remote regions to ensure the supply they require.

Another important flaw is FLO’s inability to alter the circumstances of the poorest of the poor in the coffee farming community. Although FLO does dictate certain minimal labor standards, such as paying workers minimum wage and banning child labor, the primary focus and beneficiary is the small farmer, who, in turn, is defined as a small landowner. The poorest segment of the farming community, however, is the migrant laborer who does not have the resources to own land and thus cannot be part of a cooperative. In Costa Rica, for example, most small farms, including those selling Fair Trade coffee, employ migrant laborers for harvesting, particularly from Nicaragua and Panama. Rice believes that because the “yields are so low on a small farm and it’s basically family run, the migrant labor issue is not as relevant.” But at the same time he admits that the benefits of Fair Trade do not reach migrant laborers; he says he wants to expand the model to serve this population.

Rice has never wavered from his view that Fair Trade’s “central goal is to alleviate poverty,” and he is adamant that the organization’s model is as relevant as it was 20 years ago. But during that time many of FLO’s provisions of have become duplications of regulations already in place in Latin American countries, such as minimum wage requirements, credit financing, and contracting terms. “I just don’t think that the benefits are trickling down,” says Philip Sansone, president and executive director of the Whole Planet Foundation (the philanthropic arm of Whole Foods). Rice disagrees and defends his model. “The small holders in Latin America would have no way of climbing out of poverty,” he says. “One-acre farmers standing alone are pretty much always going to be victimized by stronger market forces, be they middlemen or moneylenders. At those farm unit sizes and yields, no one is viable in the global market if they stand alone.”

Another challenge for FLO is the issue of transparency in business dealings. FLO regulations require a great amount of record keeping, to ensure that individual farmers have access to all information pertaining to the cooperative’s sales and farming practices, enabling them to make more informed business and agricultural decisions. But this record keeping has proven to be a hurdle in some cases. In addition to being time-consuming, it has also raised language and literacy barriers. Certification forms, for example, only recently were made available in Spanish. “They want a record to be kept of every daily activity, with dates and names, products, etc. They want everything kept track of. The small producers, on the other hand, can hardly write their own name,” ⁸ said Jesus Gonzales, a farmer at Tajumuco Cooperative in Guatemala. Records kept by cooperatives have shown that premiums paid for Fair Trade coffee are often used not for schools or organic farming but to build nicer facilities for cooperatives or to pay for extra office staff. Gerardo Alberto de Leon, manager of Fedecocagua, the largest cooperative in Guatemala selling Fair Trade coffee, told me during my 2006 field research, “The premium we use here [at the cooperative]—you saw our coffee lab, it is very professional.”

Although the cooperative lab may improve quality or sales or aid in member education, it is not necessarily where consumers who buy Fair Trade coffee think their money is going. Macray says coffee consumers want to know that the extra premiums are being used for social services. “Many licensees have started to question whether the premiums were being used for social good: schools, education, health, nutrition, and so on,” he says. “It became difficult to tell the story of where that premium was going. So in your retail shop, you want to be able to tell your customers, yeah, how we provide all this extra funding for these co-ops and it made these differences.”

FLO also provides incentives for some farmers to remain in the coffee business even though the market signals that they will not be successful. If a coffee farmer’s cost of production is higher than he is able to obtain for his product, he will go out of business. By offering a higher price, Fair Trade keeps him in a business for which his land may not be suitable. There are areas all over Latin America and Africa where the climate and growing conditions are simply not conducive to coffee growing. “Fair Trade directs itself to organizations and regions where there is a degree of marginality,” explains Eliecer Ureña Prado, dean of the School of Agricultural Economics at the University of Costa Rica. “We’re talking about unfavorable climates [for coffee production]. … Regions that are not competitive.”

THE FUTURE OF FAIR TRADE COFFEE

The FLO model has changed little since its inception. Although the Fair Trade price and premium for coffee has been adjusted upward over time, the rules and regulations have remained fairly static. Fair Trade’s chief legacy may be greater consumer awareness among coffee drinkers. “We generate awareness to create demand in the market,” explains Stacy Wagner, public relations manager at Fair Trade USA. And they have had tremendous success doing so. Today, according to Wagner, 50 percent of American households are aware of Fair Trade coffee, up from only 9 percent in 2005.

Representatives from Starbucks, Peet’s, and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (which owns such brands as Caribou Coffee, Tully’s, and Newman’s Own) all report a push from consumers for more transparency of contract and socially responsible business practices. It is rare to find a coffee roaster or retailer these days that does not address social issues in some way. Some do so by offering Fair Trade coffee. Others, however, have sought out other solutions, such as adopting other certifications or by developing their own programs. “A number of importers and exporters in the coffee business are saying we can get more money into the pockets of farmers through direct trade than if we use the FLO model,” says Macray.

Examples of businesses that have risen to meet consumer demands include Starbucks, Peet’s, and Whole Foods’ Allegro coffee. Although Starbucks offers Fair Trade coffee as one of a number of options, they also have put into place a C.A.F.E. Practice—a program that defines socially responsible business guidelines for their buyers. Many coffee producers have taken note of this model and made their practices more sustainable to attract the attention of Starbucks’ buyers. Likewise, Peet’s buys a lot of coffee from TechnoServe, an organization working to improve the business practices of farmers in developing countries. “One of the objections to Fair Trade could be that the term ‘cooperative’ doesn’t perforce equate to ‘farmer,’” says Moayyad. “Just because a certain price is guaranteed to the cooperative, doesn’t actually mean that the farmer is receiving it.”

With TechnoServe, farmers get a much higher percentage of the proceeds—up to 60 percent more according to Moayyad, even though their stated focus is “developing entrepreneurs, building businesses and industries, and improving the business environment.” ⁹ TechnoServe’s model focuses on quality production and farm management. “It’s not a charity,” says Jim Reynolds, roast master emeritus of Peet’s, who has more than 30 years of buying experience. “It’s building skills and better business organization, so they can run their own co-ops more efficiently and earn better pricing by finding good buyers.” Teter also follows this type of socially responsible corporate investment. Allegro pays well above the Fair Trade price to obtain the quality coffees its customers want. In addition, 5 percent of Allegro’s profits goes to charity, and 85 percent is spent in growers’ communities.

“The model for sustainable coffee that was popular five years ago has changed quite a bit,” says Macray. “Five years ago, it was common practice to just go out and buy certified coffees and check the box; and today it’s about integrating sustainability and transparency into your supply chain. Companies are making it a core way of doing business."

For more on Fair Trade:
Read a counterpoint to “The Problem with Fair Trade Coffee” article.

Read “The Future of Fair Trade…Is There One?” blog.

Listen to the “Alberto Irezabal – Bringing Fair Trade to Indigenous Farmers” podcast.

Colleen Haight is an assistant professor at San Jose State University, currently on leave to serve as the economics program officer at the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University. She previously worked at Adams Corp., a Silicon Valley start-up that was acquired by Adobe Systems.

Two decades ago, a young business student named David Griswold witnessed a similar phenomenon in Mexico, as a volunteer at the National Coordinating Body for Coffee Farmer Cooperatives. He saw that after this government office, which provided agronomical training and price stability for Mexico’s 250,000 coffee farmers, was eliminated as part of a push to deregulate coffee and other industries, farmers were plunged unprepared into global competition. They became subject to commodity market swings and a food industry that annually produced 400 billion cups of coffee while paying pauper’s wages to the people growing the beans.

Other industry reformers founded nonprofits to help farmers, or devised consumer-targeted certification systems—fair trade, organic, Rainforest Alliance—to be overlaid on the existing industry. Griswold decided to join the industry. In 1997, he founded Sustainable Harvest Coffee Importers, in Portland, Ore. “We’re analogous to the multinational traders. We do everything they do—and we’re profitable,” says Griswold. “But we use our profits to improve the livelihood of our farmers.”

As of 2010, Sustainable Harvest had worked with nearly 200,000 farmers in 14 countries. The company enables farmers and roasters to negotiate directly; once the roasters agree to purchase beans and the contracts are finalized, Sustainable Harvest helps farmers secure financing through nonprofit social investment funds. When the crop is ready, Sustainable Harvest also handles logistics and international shipments, ultimately charging roasters between 7 percent and 8 percent of purchase price. Last year the company oversaw $34 million in sales to roasters in North America, Europe, and South Africa, of which $31.5 million went straight to growers. Of Sustainable Harvest’s $2.5 million share, the company spent more than half on development-related projects and overhead: nine employees in Portland and 21 at four field offices in Latin America and East Africa, who train farmers in sustainable—and profitable—agronomic techniques. The remaining share went to support Sustainable Harvest’s six-person staff in Portland and to rent warehouse space in Oakland, Calif., and Kearny, N.J.

Such a business model may seem more charitable than profitable, but it’s proved a bottom-line success: Sales are expected to reach $40 million in 2011 and $100 million by 2014. And in Tanzania, where Sustainable Harvest started working in 2007, the Kanyovu collective no longer depends on arbitrary local buyers for their income. They grade their own coffee. Last year, the collective won the prestigious African Taste of Harvest competition. Farmers received $1.80 per pound, three times what they were paid before.

A TRANSPARENT SUPPLY CHAIN

Business was not always bountiful for Sustainable Harvest. When Griswold started the company, he was confronted by the race-to-the-bottom logic of commodity markets, which made only rough distinctions between coffee grades. Good arabica beans were generally lumped with the bad, and all prices were pulled down by competition with low-grade robusto beans grown in deforested fields and doused with pesticides and herbicides. So long as farmers’ earnings were linked to these markets, they’d be stuck.

Sustainable coffee activists believed that a new market needed to be created, one in which origin and quality would be used to differentiate beans. In the traditional supply chain, roasters are ignorant of coffee’s origins; that is sometimes true of fair trade or organic coffees, which can be sold by importers who promise sustainability but provide only general information about geographic origin. Griswold’s vision was to enable buyers to reward quality and to know exactly where coffee came from. It was an innovative, idealistic plan—except Griswold promptly took the company into bankruptcy.

Banking on the burgeoning appeal of shade-grown coffee, he bought 50 tons at $2 per pound. Before he could find a roaster to purchase it, the price dropped by half. Griswold became victim to the market volatility he hoped to fix. He spent the next two years working 15-hour days, clawing the company back to solvency. “It was a lonely time,” he says. “When I started working with farmers in 2000 and 2001, when prices had gone down to 50 cents [per pound], I would say, ‘I know what it feels like to be bankrupt, to not want to face your parents or your wife.’ We had a connection over that.”

Those farmers also had a message for Griswold, who hid his problems. “They said: ‘You should have told us. We could have helped out.’ It occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t alone. Maybe I could collaborate,” says Griswold. “So I started being more transparent about what was going on, what I was trying, and what the prices were. And once I employed transparency, I found out that the business accelerated because of it.”

Transparency is now part of a suite of practices that Sustainable Harvest calls its Relationship Coffee model. An alliterative list of mandates, the model includes training, trade credit, traceability, and technology, but transparency is the unifying theme. Sustainable Harvest’s books are always open, as are the relationships it forges among farmers and roasters. The company introduces the two parties and then largely removes itself from negotiations. “Most of the intermediaries in coffee want to keep that wall between grower and buyer,” says Laura Tilghman, Sustainable Harvest’s communications director, because keeping those parties in the dark helps buyers maximize their own profits. “Our model says: Take the wall out of the way, and put everyone at the table.”

Tilghman is not speaking figuratively. Since 2002, Sustainable Harvest has held annual conferences, called “Let’s Talk Coffee,” at which roasters and farmers talk shop and do business. New deals are struck and existing partnerships strengthened, making the events—one annual global meeting, held in Central or South America, and thrice-yearly regional gatherings held in those regions or in East Africa—essential to establishing prices through direct roaster-farmer dialogues, rather than through commodity market calculations.

“There are long-term relationships,” says Rick Peyser, director of social advocacy and coffee community outreach at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, a publicly traded company that purchases much of its organic and fair trade beans from Sustainable Harvest. “It’s not just buying coffee because the price is best from this group in one year, and a different group the next.”

Though buyers pay above-commodity prices, they recover the costs in various ways, from the ethical rewards of participating in a decent system to bean quality to efficiencies introduced by product stability and transparency. Green Mountain’s partnership with a Vera Cruz, Mexico, farmer cooperative has lasted 14 years; over that time, says Peyser, the cooperative tailored its beans to the company’s specifications, enabling them to charge more while providing Green Mountain with a consistency difficult to find elsewhere.

Personal relationships also provide buffers against price fluctuation, preventing farmers from abandoning sustainable practices to take advantage of coffee price spikes. Farmers directly engaged with roasters that want chemical-free coffee are reluctant to jeopardize that relationship, says Griswold. Instead, farmers can raise their prices—and roasters are willing to accede. Other farmers might sell cheaper beans, but roasters would need to spend more to ensure a consistent supply. Trust has value.

EXPANSION DURING GLOBAL RECESSION

Even as the global economy dipped and stagnated, the fortunes of Sustainable Harvest and its partners rose. For the last five years, sales grew by an average of 30 percent annually; from $25 million in 2009, sales are expected to hit $40 million in 2011 and account for approximately one-eighth of all fair trade coffee imported into the United States. Expansion to Indonesia is planned, and a Colombian office may follow. Griswold has succeeded in his original mission.

It remains to be seen, however, whether Sustainable Harvest’s model can scale up. Global coffee demand is booming, as developing countries—especially China—adopt Western habits of coffee consumption. Unless Sustainable Harvest’s model can serve the market’s vast middle, and not just its high end, its effectiveness will be limited.

According to coffee expert Daniele Giovannucci, a World Bank consultant and founder of the Committee on Sustainability Assessment, the model’s prospects are good. Corporate behemoths like Walmart, Sara Lee, and Kraft are demanding responsibly sourced coffee, and direct negotiations with Sustainable Harvest’s 200,000 farmers could benefit them no less than they have benefited Green Mountain. Sustainable Harvest will never serve the market’s bottom, as those coffees are priced below the point where economic sufficiency and environmental safety are possible. But the middle is a reasonable target.

Giovanucci believes Sustainable Harvest’s model would work even if replicated by other, more profit-focused entrepreneurs. Griswold’s company has shown that transparency and farmer development are not charity, but long-term investments. “The work they do is by definition applicable in other areas. It works through a business model, and clearly the business model is successful,” he says.

Tilghman named cocoa, salt, and flour as commodities where the Sustainable Harvest model could create new markets. Peyser mentioned cocoa and bananas. “Everyone is at the table and connected,” says Griswold. “I believe we’re creating the future of global supply chains.”

Brandon Keim is a freelance science and environment writer. He has written for SSIR on environmental advocacy in India, earthquake-resistant housing, and the future of green building certification.

“Happy” could mean you think your life is going well overall, as the word has connoted in previous studies. It could mean you smile and laugh a lot in a given day. Or it could just mean you’re not suffering much. The researchers used the Gallup World Poll, representing 96 percent of the planet’s adult population, to look at well-being from multiple angles. More than 136,000 people in 132 countries completed the questionnaire from 2005 to 2006.

It turns out that the kind of happiness money can buy worldwide is a high evaluation of oneself. The more wealth and luxury conveniences, such as televisions and computers, you have, the better you view your life. That rich people think they are happier even if they don’t enjoy themselves more is “not a surprise,” says Carol Graham, a happiness researcher and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. The survey framed the self-evaluation question in a global context, asking people to rate their lives on a scale of “worst” to “best possible.” “And somebody in Togo knows the best possible life is not in Togo,” says Graham.

At the lower end of the income scale, money can contribute to feeling less bad: If it gets food in your stomach and a roof over your head, having more will decrease your anger, sadness, worry, and depression. After meeting basic needs, though, money loses the power to soothe—the United States is the richest nation and also populated by the most worriers.

As for actually enjoying oneself? Money is almost no help. The researchers found that social and psychological needs—being treated with respect, having friends, learning new things, doing what you do best, and being able to choose how you spend your time—trump everything else, no matter where you live. “The thing that surprised me most was how consistent some of these patterns were across different parts of the world,” Harter says.

Graham’s own research reveals similar trends. People in Afghanistan are happier than the world average; and “after having enough food to eat, the most important thing to Latin Americans’ happiness is having a friend or family member they can fall back on in times of need,” Graham says. Although it’s true that people in developing countries have the social and psychological means to be as chipper as New Zealanders (who scored first in positive feelings), happiness may not be an appropriate goal for development. “People make do with what they’ve got,” Graham says. “They adapt to prosperity and they also adapt to adversity. … People in Kenya are as satisfied with their health as people in the United States, even though objective standards are moons apart.”

Ed Diener, Weiting Ng, James Harter, et al., “Wealth and Happiness Across the World: Material Prosperity Predicts Life Evaluation, Whereas Psychosocial Prosperity Predicts Positive Feeling,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99, 2010.

We were suing them. It was the first lawsuit in the United States against an international marriage broker and our show of legal strength was impressive. The Tahirih Justice Center, which I head, co-counseled with the blue-chip law firm Arnold & Porter, which built a formidable legal team and paid out of pocket for expert witnesses, private investigators, translators, and travel expenses. The 2004 trial lasted two weeks, the preparation for trial lasted two years, and the total cost of the litigation and other advocacy efforts on this issue was well over $1 million. The result was a high-profile legal victory and a clear message to the international marriage broker industry that it will be held accountable for facilitating abusive marriages. In addition, critical attention was drawn to the issue, which resulted in the passage of a new law to regulate the industry.

I asked my client why she was crying in the courtroom, and if there was anything I could do to help her. She smiled and said that hers were tears of joy from having so many advocates, after feeling powerless for so long. More than the legal victory we won, her feeling of empowerment was an important measure of success. Her husband was a wealthy man and now she, too, had resources—the experience gave her strength, in addition to justice.

Similar resources are ready and waiting throughout the United States to help those in need. Well-meaning attorneys and publicly minded law firms are eager to take on pro bono cases and help others access justice. Regretfully, too few nonprofit organizations maximize their engagement.

Tahirih is a growing nonprofit organization that provides local holistic legal services and national public policy advocacy on behalf of women and girls fleeing violence. Tahirih’s clients have fled such human rights abuses as forced marriage, human trafficking, female genital mutilation, domestic violence, rape, and honor crimes. After 13 years of serving the Washington, D.C., area, Tahirih has refined an innovative model for providing high-quality services that is efficient, effective, and replicable. We are in the process of replicating our services model, and within the last year we have opened offices in Houston and Baltimore.

Our partnerships with almost 800 pro bono attorneys from 130 law firms, who donate their time and expertise to protect our clients, quintuple the impact we are able to have on our clients and turn every dollar donated into five. In 2009, we leveraged more than $7.7 million in donated legal and other services on behalf of our clients, while our budget remained under $2 million. Our model for service delivery effectively protects the lives of the women and girls we serve—and despite the challenging and complex cases we litigate, we maintain a 99 percent success rate. Tahirih has received several awards for its pro bono program and management practices, including the 2007 Washington Post Award for Excellence in Nonprofit Management. But most important, our model has allowed us to maximize the number of women and girls we serve, resulting in more than 11,000 women and children receiving help.

PRO BONO RESOURCES

Although there are certainly many organizations that leverage pro bono attorneys, Tahirih is distinguished among organizations providing direct in-house legal representation in the way it leverages donated services. Members of Tahirih’s Pro Bono Attorney Network co-counsel with Tahirih attorneys on 75 percent of all incoming cases. In contrast, an in-depth survey that Tahirih conducted in 2006 of other immigration legal services organizations in the Washington, D.C., area revealed that most use pro bono attorneys in only up to 10 percent of their caseloads.

Underutilization of pro bono resources is common among legal services organizations, often because of the additional resources required to ramp up an effective volunteer management program. The unfortunate reality, however, is that the failure to develop an effective pro bono program ultimately diminishes efficiency. Tahirih found that, after reaching an economy of scale, pro bono partnerships led to a new dimension of performance, allowing Tahirih to serve more women and girls while at the same time progressively reducing the cost of representation. Before Tahirih’s pro bono network was formalized, an in-house attorney represented an average of 40 cases, involving 85 unique legal matters. By contrast, through pro bono partnerships today, an in-house attorney represents an average of 50 to 55 cases, involving more than 105 unique matters. The cost per matter litigated has also decreased.

Some important qualities of a successful pro bono legal program include:

Adequate training, mentorship, and support: Many corporate attorneys are intimidated by taking on a case involving an area of the law and a client base with which they are unfamiliar. To support attorneys in taking on Tahirih clients’ cases, we provide an assigned in-house attorney mentor who is an expert in the relevant area of law and works closely with the pro bono attorney in the course of her legal representation; training manuals; training seminars on relevant law, cultural sensitivity, post-traumatic stress disorder, and boundary issues; an e-forum where attorneys can access model briefs and applications, country condition reports, and other supporting documents; and a monthly e-newsletter.

Customer service orientation: Pro bono attorneys contribute a valuable resource and are most likely to continue their involvement with timely, professional, and responsive interactions.

Manage ongoing nonlegal issues of clients: Tahirih has social services staff who manage the nonlegal needs of our clients, which include emergency housing, English classes, child care, job skills training, psychological counseling, and medical care. This is often a welcome relief for our pro bono as well as in-house attorneys, who recognize that public benefits and social services are complex and difficult to navigate.

Comprehensive prescreening of cases: Once a law firm has accepted a case from a referring nonprofit organization, its attorneys want to proceed with confidence that the client has been screened for credibility and that their case is winnable. This means that a qualified attorney will need to be involved in the screening process, to make the legal judgments necessary for effective referral.

Active co-counsel agreements: Ethics rules governing client-attorney privilege do not generally permit attorneys to discuss the facts of a case or its ongoing status without a formal co-counsel agreement that “protects the privilege.” In addition, co-counsel agreements help to outline expected roles and responsibilities for those working on the case.

Provide meaningful opportunities for feedback and improvement: Even the best-designed pro bono program will need continual improvement. To this end, Tahirih receives feedback from pro bono attorneys through satisfaction surveys. In addition, feedback from pro bono attorneys working with in-house staff attorneys is often solicited in the course of a staff attorney’s annual evaluation process. Finally, Tahirih’s legal services team annually engages in a process-mapping exercise and a strategic planning process designed to assess and improve metrics, goals, and efficiencies.

Recognition of commitment: Each year a pro bono firm and individual attorney are recognized at our annual benefit. We also send thank-you notes to our pro bono attorneys at the successful completion of cases.

FEEDING THE SOUL

Despite popular belief, many attorneys are motivated by altruistic notions of justice. Although some law firms engage in pro bono representation as a way to train young attorneys, retain staff, and enhance their reputations, many more will do it simply to feed their souls. A 2005 study conducted by the American Bar Association found that the prime motivator for 70 percent of attorneys doing pro bono work is the “combined sense of professional duty and personal satisfaction derived from the work.”

Justin Stein, one of our pro bono attorneys who formerly worked at Latham & Watkins, reflected: “As junior associates in a large law firm, working on Farida’s case gave us all invaluable trial court experience. … When the judge finally granted Farida asylum, her face blossomed as the anxiety faded in favor of sheer joy. At that moment, I realized that … I had truly helped another human being, and that is a feeling worth repeating.”

Ross Goldstein, another Tahirih pro bono attorney who previously worked at Arnold & Porter, remembered, “When I walked up to [my client], she looked at me with real fear and trepidation in her eyes, and I told her, ‘You win.’ It took a second for it to register, but then she leapt to her feet, hugged me, and wept for several minutes. I looked down and saw her 9-year-old daughter, who had been facing the prospect of having to testify on her mother’s behalf, latch on to Sahar’s legs and smile—a genuine smile. … There is simply no greater feeling as a human being, let alone as an attorney.”

The nonprofit sector has a valuable opportunity to leverage the willingness of corporate attorneys to engage in pro bono work. We simply have to harness it.

Layli Muill-Muro is the founder of the Tahirih Justice Center and has been its executive director for nine years. Before joining Tahirih’s staff, she was a litigation associate at Arnold & Porter and an attorney-advisor at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Board of Immigration Appeals.

Hany Farid, a computer scientist from Dartmouth College, was appalled to learn that not only is this illicit business booming, “but the children are getting younger and the images more violent. This is a problem that technology has gotten us into,” Farid mused. “Let’s see if we can use technology to help get ourselves out of it.”

Farid collaborated with researchers from Microsoft to develop a new tool intended to disrupt online trafficking in child porn. The core technology is called PhotoDNA. It extracts a unique signature from any digital photo using a process called “robust hashing.” This numeric signature, which Farid likens to human DNA, does not change even if a photograph is resized or edited. The signature can be used to identify matches across very large data sets.

The process is automated, meaning no human has to review potentially offensive images. It’s also lightning fast—five milliseconds to extract a signature—and has proven highly reliable in massive testing. For law enforcement and online service providers on guard against child porn, Farid adds, “this means being able to find the proverbial needle in the haystack.”

Microsoft has donated PhotoDNA to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), including the right to sublicense the technology to online service providers. In recent years, the nonprofit NCMEC has worked closely with law enforcement to identify nearly 30 million photos of child porn. With the use of PhotoDNA, those images can be used to generate a vast data set of digital signatures to detect known photographs of child pornography.

If online service providers detect any of these images, they can report them to the NCMEC. The long-term goal, according to Sue Hotelling of Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, is to “help stop the distribution of these illegal and horrific images and help stop revictimization of children whose images may otherwise be viewed again and again online.”

Pulling down those images won’t keep new child porn from being uploaded, but it may help to reduce the problem. “People who traffic in child porn seem to pass around the same images, person to person,” Farid says. Getting known images offline “is a little more tractable” than cleansing the entire Internet of child pornography, he says.

Because PhotoDNA is a generic tool, it could be applied to any type of image. “It may have other applications down the road,” Hotelling says. “We are exploring other ways to put it to use, including incorporating the technology into tools to help law enforcement in their child protection investigations,” she adds.

Implementation of the tool is still in the early stages, with Microsoft starting to search public sources for some of the worst known instances of child porn. The goal, Farid says, is to have it implemented “at all the Internet service providers around the world. We’re still working on that.”

“Villages were deciding what kind of local public good they wanted to build,” says Olken. “They had a block grant and they could decide how they wanted to use the money, whether it should be to build a road, or a well, or an irrigation system,” or something else. In one of the first randomized field experiments of its kind, Olken designated the political process itself. He picked out 49 villages representing more than 100,000 people participating in the Indonesian Kecamatan Development Program (KDP), which is funded through a World Bank loan to finance small-scale infrastructure activities. Some of the villages continued to choose their preferred proposal at a meeting attended by a small group of village leaders—the usual KDP way. In the remaining villages, Olken set up direct election-based plebiscites in which every eligible citizen could vote.

“The key finding is that the plebiscite process resulted in dramatically higher levels of satisfaction and legitimacy of the program and of the proposal,” says Olken. Having had the opportunity to vote, the people in the study were more satisfied with the development program and judged the winning proposal fairer. They were more likely to agree that the project was “in accordance with the people’s aspirations,” that they would use the project, and that it would benefit them personally.

Interestingly, this was true despite the fact that villages chose exactly the same proposals through both political processes. They decided to build roads and bridges about 60 percent of the time and water and sanitation projects about 12 percent of the projects about 12 percent of the time, regardless of whether the decision was made at a village meeting or by a direct election with 20 times as many people participating.

That direct plebiscite did not change the ultimate decision is surprising. Still, it makes the increase in satisfaction all the more striking. “It’s some of the clearest evidence we have that the process can matter even if the outcomes don’t change,” says Olken. It shows that “direct participation can be a legitimizing force,” and when soliciting local input for community-driven development programs, “the details matter a lot. There’s a real difference between direct participation and indirect participation.” time, regardless of whether the decision was made at a village meeting or by a direct election with 20 times as many people participating.

Benjamin A. Olken, “Direct Democracy and Local Public Goods: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia,” American Political Science Review, 104, 2010.

West Virginia’s spirited response is among a growing collection of anti-hate stories shared on a Web site called Not in Our Town. “The story of resistance to intolerance is ever new,” says Patrice O’Neill, a documentary filmmaker whose work has sparked this grassroots movement against hate.

The Not in Our Town Web site launched in April, but O’Neill and colleagues at the Working Group, a nonprofit media company in Oakland, Calif., have a long history of producing anti-hate messages. In 1995, PBS aired their first Not in Our Town documentary about the citizens of Billings, Mont., rallying to resist white supremacists. As a follow-up to the broadcast, filmmakers offered to host town hall meetings with interested communities, using the Billings story as a starting point for conversation. “We expected to organize 10 [town meetings]. There were more than 100 across the country,” O’Neill recalls. “People recognized that we need to have discussions about how we treat each other.”

For most filmmakers, that would have been a satisfying conclusion to a project. But this story wouldn’t go away. O’Neill soon found herself fielding calls from Bloomington, Ill., where citizens were organizing a local campaign in support of African- American churches. “They had created a whole series of events around the documentary,” O’Neill recalls, “and so we went there with our cameras.” Similar events played out in Kokomo, Ind., and Columbus, Ohio. “People were ready to take the Not in Our Town story and make it their own. There were incredibly innovative actions taking place on the ground, and it was important for us to document those actions and retell those stories.”

Mark Potok, who directs the Intelligence Project for the Southern Poverty Law Center, considers O’Neill’s work “terribly important. No town wants to say, ‘We have a problem with hate,’” he adds. But by gathering examples of citizens who do speak up when confronted with intolerance, the Not in Our Town Web site “has made this into a national idea. Communities can see how to use these events to create discussions that would never occur otherwise,” he adds. The Billings story stands out, he adds, “as one of the most brilliant, homegrown responses to hate this country has ever seen.”

As a grassroots movement, Not in Our Town has evolved in parallel with the Internet. At first, resources were simply shared on the PBS Web site. As the Internet became more interactive, the Working Group realized they needed to have their own Web site. They started creating the new site with help from the Bay Area Video Coalition. Several foundations contributed money to help pay for building the site. The next challenge, O’Neill says, will be teaching community members how to use digital tools to document and share their own stories.

Involvement in the Not in Our Town Web site “has changed me as a filmmaker,” O’Neill says, and has also shifted the focus of the Working Group toward advocacy. “There are lots of ways we could cover hate crimes. We focus on individuals and communities who are trying to create better, safer, more inclusive environments,” she says. By incorporating civic engagement into their work and expanding their reach through online tools, “there is a more robust life for our stories,” adds O’Neill. “People find their own, innovative ways to build on them.”

“There is a widespread assumption that collective guilt has positive outcomes,” notes Imhoff. Yet several theories in sociology and psychology offer a different logic: Guilt moves people not to relieve suffering, but to exacerbate it by rationalizing that the victims somehow deserve their plight. Other theories reach the same conclusion through different paths: Rather than guilt, people’s desire to believe in a just world or to maintain the status quo can lead them to despise victims. Noting these ironic misplacements of malice, the Israeli psychoanalyst Zvi Rex once quipped, “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.”

Imhoff and his coauthor, University of Bonn professor Rainer Banse, captured this form of anti-Semitism in a novel laboratory experiment. University students first read a passage about the Holocaust that stressed either the anguish Jews experienced in the past or the distress that Holocaust survivors and their descendants still suffer today. While allegedly connected to a lie detector, these participants then completed tasks that measured both their conscious and unconscious attitudes toward Jews. Results revealed that participants who read about Jews’ ongoing suffering became more anti-Semitic, whereas those who read about Jews’ suffering in the past did not.

In a control condition that lacked the bogus lie detector, however, participants who read about Jews’ ongoing suffering reported far less anti-Jewish sentiment. The authors reason that, without a machine pressing them to answer honestly, these participants behaved according to the social norm of responding to suffering with empathy, rather than according to their true attitudes. Although social norms often steer individual actions, “under certain conditions these more or less hidden attitudes will sneak out—for example, if you feel safe to say unpopular things,” explains Imhoff.

One situation where people feel free to unleash their prejudices is the relative anonymity of the Internet. When science blogs first repoted this study’s findings, “what we feared would happen, happened,” says Imhoff. “There were a lot of anti-Semitic remarks that Jews should stop whining about the Holocaust.” This is not the researchers’ message, however. “Telling victims just to hide their suffering and be silent is not a viable solution,” he says.

Instead, Imhoff is exploring ways to work around people’s psychological defenses so that they might fully empathize with victims. In one line of research, for instance, he is examining whether taking the perspectives of injured parties can short-circuit people’s victim-blaming tendencies. “We need more research on the perpetrator side,” he says.

Roland Imhoff and Rainer Banse, “Ongoing Victim Suffering Increases Prejudice: The Case of Secondary Anti-Semitism,” Psychological Science, December 2009.

This creative campaign is one of eight to emerge from a national, three-year initiative called New Routes to Community Health. Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Benton Foundation, New Routes aims to improve the health of vulnerable and often isolated populations by enabling immigrants to use media to tell their own stories.

User-created content focuses on a range of topics and employs an assortment of digital tools. In Boston, Haitian immigrants are producing a series of radio soap operas, or telenovelas, to raise awareness of depression and anxiety within their community. In Chicago, young Latinos are writing and staging theatrical productions that break down cultural taboos about sexuality and other sensitive topics.

Although they differ in details, the eight projects “all deal with mental health issues in some way,” says Beth Mastin, New Routes’ program director. “It’s all about the disempowerment and dislocation that come with trying to make a new home in a foreign country.” New Routes’ Web site amplifies the conversation by posting content from all eight projects, creating a media-rich clearinghouse on immigrant health topics.

To ensure collaboration, proposals had to include three partners to qualify for a three-year, $225,000 grant. Each project includes a managing partner, media partner, and immigrant partner. “The immigrant partner is first among equals,” Mastin adds. Managing partners, mostly universities, provide grant management along with academic expertise. Media partners, such as station WHYY in Philadelphia, handle technical training so that immigrants can use digital tools successfully.

That leaves immigrant organizations to focus on developing content that matters most to the populations they serve, whether it’s Latina victims of domestic violence in Oakland, Calif., or Somali refugee families coping with mental illness in Minneapolis. Projects build local leadership capacity, Mastin adds, “so that immigrants literally find their voice and are able to articulate their concerns.”

Ba Nguyen, an elderly Vietnamese immigrant living in Philadelphia, is a good example. At a digital storytelling workshop in the WHYY studios, she was a quick study when it came to using video gear. Before long, she was teaching other elders from Philadelphia’s Southeast Asian community how to conduct on-camera interviews. Their digital stories will help fellow immigrants overcome language and cultural barriers so they can better communicate with doctors about hypertension and other health concerns.

Kahn’s objective in writing the book is to help interested readers answer a question he often hears: “So do you think I should become an organizer?” By writing the book, he hopes to provide an inspirational, but honest picture of what it means to be an organizer so that idealists can make their own choices about whether this is the path for them. Like any good organizer, Kahn teaches through storytelling. His narrative voice is affable, inspirational, and humorous. The book is strongest when Kahn illustrates some of the complex ethical and strategic challenges organizers face through vivid examples from his own past.

In one of his earliest experiences as a young (Jewish) organizer with SNCC, Kahn describes learning strategizing. To force a white-owned store to hire black cashiers, SNCC leaders decide to boycott only one of four department stores in the city, to prevent the storeowners from uniting together against the black community. “Brilliant!” Kahn thinks. “So which of the department stores were we going to boycott?” When his SNCC mentors respond, “The ‘Jew store,’” Kahn freezes in his tracks. “SNCC was fighting for the ultimate underdog, African-Americans. [I understood the strategy, but] to target another historic underdog, even if one more privileged than his black customers—didn’t that just reinforce the injustice?”

Kahn wisely avoids moralizing in these stories and instead raises questions, describes his own experiences and reactions, and leaves us to ponder the choices we might make ourselves.

In one of these instances, Kahn tells the story of Aunt Molly Jackson, an activist who robbed a store at gunpoint to steal food for impoverished mining families. In raising some of the ethical issues in this story, Kahn asks, “Is Aunt Molly Jackson an organizer or a community leader?” This question raises an important point that unfortunately goes unanswered.

One of the book’s shortcomings is that Kahn never defines what it means to be an organizer, as distinct from a community leader or other type of activist. Too often, the term is used to represent any person doing any kind of community-based advocacy or service work. Organizing is not just any kind of community-based work, however. It is a specific approach to making change that involves, at a minimum, bringing people together to discover common resources they have to fight power structures that marginalize them or their constituents.

An organizer’s emphasis on bringing those without power together to discover and create the collective resources they need to fight those with power implies certain values that underlie organizing. For instance, change comes from within the community. Organizing is not just about solving problems, but also about creating capacity (such as motivation and skills for democratic leadership) within communities to solve problems. Service provision, marketing, and creating policy that “nudges” individual incentives are all alternative approaches to making community-based change that are distinct from organizing because they do not involve building capacity.

Clarifying what organizing is and how it is unique could have grounded some of the 20 principles of organizing Kahn identifies. For instance, he has a forceful discussion about the importance of diversity in organizing, providing concrete strategies for organizers seeking to ensure that they maintain sensitivity to race in building organizations. Yet he falls short in arguing why respecting diversity is so important. Is it just a liberal norm that we must respect? Or is it grounded in the core philosophies of organizing, in identifying and developing leadership within the community to leave it stronger than when the organizer found it?

Organizing is a powerful tool for social change that historically has helped to change the world. We need to do more to sharpen our definitions of what it is and develop widespread understandings of what it can accomplish. Kahn’s book is a valuable contribution to this effort, providing readers with an accessible set of narratives and reflections about life as an organizer. The next step for anyone trying to understand how social change works is to develop more coherent, empirically grounded theories of organizing that can shape the work of the future organizers Kahn is recruiting through his book.

Each week, an estimated 85 percent of radio listeners in Rwanda tune their radio dials to the soap opera Musekeweya (New Dawn). Using a Romeo and Juliet plot to symbolize Hutus and Tutsis, the program teaches listeners how to prevent ethnic violence, embrace reconciliation, and heal the wounds of the past.

In 1994, radio-borne hate propaganda helped prompt a Hutuled genocide of 75 percent of the ethnic minority Tutsis. Within three months, the genocide wiped out 10 percent of the Rwandan population — some 750,000 victims. Now, Musekeweya is reclaiming the radio to help survivors live together again.

“Musekeweya helped me calm down,” says Kennedy Munyangeyo, a 36-year-old filmmaker from Kigali who lost his two brothers, several uncles, and a sister to the genocide. “I used to think that we should react by hating the people who did the genocide, but after a year of listening to the show, I realize that if someone did a bad thing, the answer is not to react by doing more bad things,” he says. “For this country to go forward we need to be honest and free in our spirits and minds.”

Created by the Dutch nonprofit Radio La Benevolencija, in conjunction with some of the foremost psychologists, traumatologists, and university researchers in the United States, Musekeweya was first broadcast in 2003 on the government- controlled Radio Rwanda. Local Rwandans write the stories, and a cast of 35 Rwandan actors read the parts in Kinyarwanda, the country’s main language. Today, Musekeweya can also be heard on privately owned radio stations in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Each week, soap coordinator Aimable Twahirwa receives up to 120 letters from fans. The show is so popular, he says, that parents are naming their children after the characters. And at a recent festival, more than 10,000 fans showed up to meet the actors. “The actors, they are like small gods here,” he says.

Yet the listeners are not just worshipful followers. Instead finds a recent study, they are more likely than non-listeners to stand up to authority and to voice their own opinions. This kind of civic leadership can stop the slide toward genocide, says psychologist Ervin Staub. “Genocide is a societal process,” he notes. “It takes not only bad leaders, but also followers and those who stand by and do nothing.”

The Science of Civility

Musekeweya crackled onto the airwaves at a crucial moment in Rwandan history. In the late 1990s, 1.5 million of the country’s 8 million people were accused of participating in the genocide. The legal system and prisons were not prepared for this influx of cases, so community leaders created some 10,000 village tribunals, or “gacacas.” After judgment from a jury of their peers, convicted participants could reduce their punishments through communal labor.

Because the genocide was so vast, convicted war criminals were also the neighbors, coworkers, and in-laws of the innocent. “The accused would soon be free and returning to these villages, and it was very traumatizing to everyone who lived there,” explains George Weiss, founder of Radio La Benevolencija.

At that time, Staub, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts, and Laurie Pearlman, a traumatologist at the Headington Institute in Pasadena, Calif., had just finished a three-year reconciliation training program in Rwanda. Their seminars reflected Staub’s theory of the origins of genocide: It begins with scapegoating, leading to destructive ideology, and then culminates in actual violence. He describes his research in his book Roots of Evil.

“Government and nonprofit leaders at our workshops wanted us to reach a wider audience,” says Pearlman. “Because radio is the main means of communication in Rwanda and people listen together in large groups, we decided to develop a radio program.”

At the same time, Weiss, an Austrian filmmaker of Jewish descent living in the Netherlands, had just finished reading Staub’s book. It prompted him to start working on a television series to counteract hate speech and violence in Bosnia.

Weiss met Staub and Pearlman in 2001 to consult on his TV series. By the end of the conversation, they had convinced Weiss to come to Rwanda and create a similar program for the radio.

Weiss raised $1 million from the Dutch and Belgian foreign ministries and the United Nations. He then created the nonprofit Radio La Benevolencija Humanitarian Tools Foundation and set to work on a script with Staub and Pearlman. “We come up with the story line, but the actual episodes are written by Rwandan writers who make it culturally credible,” Staub says.

Everyday Heroes

Musekeweya’s plot centers around two villages: Muhumuro and Bumanzi. Muhumuro is less fertile and prosperous, and resents Bumanzi for receiving land with good soil from the government. Muhumuro residents also contend that the land is rightfully theirs.

These tensions between the villages mirror the situation that led to the 1994 genocide. Also mimicking real life, disputes over inheritance, intermarriage, and irrigation in the soap opera further inflame the grievances between the two villages, culminating in revenge attacks, village burnings, and, ultimately, killings. When a progressive youth group brings in wise elders, the animosities dissipate and the two villages come up with a crop-sharing plan. Writers keep the episodes rolling with political intrigues, love affairs, and new disputes.

A thread running throughout Musekeweya is that everyday fear and instability—arising from poverty, health problems, relationship woes, and other sources—can lead to people to think in terms of “us” and “them,” and then to blame “them” for one’s own problems while blindly banding together with “us.” This thinking then escalates to intergroup hostilities and violence. Characters on the show who resist these tendencies by intervening in unjust activities, critically examining authority, and healing trauma become the show’s heroes.

One such character is Batamuliza, played by Monica Uwingabiye, a 35-year-old high school teacher whose father was Hutu and mother was Tutsi. Like the rest of the cast, she reads her lines one Sunday a month at the studio. The job hasn’t made her rich, but it has made her feel purposeful. “I like changing people’s minds,” she says. “I lost my younger three sisters, brother, and my father. This is a history we have to figure out how to live with,” she says.

New Norms

Yet people’s minds are not changing—at least not in the ways that psychologists usually expect, finds Elizabeth Paluck, an assistant professor of psychology at Princeton University. For her doctoral thesis at Yale University, she helped the original Radio La Benevolencija design team evaluate the soap’s impact after its first year. She divided 480 Rwandans into two groups, one that listened to the soap and a control group that tuned in to a health program.

Paluck found that although the Musekeweya listeners’ personal beliefs and feelings had not changed, what they thought everyone else believed and felt had changed. In other words, their perceptions of the social norms were different. Specifically, they believed that marrying across ethnic lines, questioning authority, and expressing genocide-related psychological distress were more socially acceptable than did the control groups. Because social norms govern so much of human behavior, this finding is a sign that the soap opera is having its intended effect, says Staub.

Indeed, Paluck witnessed behavior change firsthand. As a gift for their efforts, participants received the radio and cassette tapes used in the study. People in the control groups unanimously decided to hand over the radio to the village elder to regulate its use and collect money for batteries. In contrast, the soap opera groups voted for a group-share plan or to have one of the study participants regulate the radio’s use. “That tells me that something changed in that public space that made them comfortable saying something unpopular,” says Paluck, who published her findings in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Who keeps the radio may seem like a minor matter, but in Rwanda, it’s a big indicator, says Staub. “An aim of our program is to moderate respect for authority, because over-strong respect for authority is one of the steps that led to the Rwandan genocide.”

Rwandan culture is showing other signs of change, says Pearlman. “When we started our work in Rwanda, there were one psychologist and two psychiatrists for a country of 8 million people,” she says. “One thing we encountered was people thought traumatized people were crazy. Now I see a lot more empathy.”

Even outside of Rwanda’s borders, Musekeweya is having an effect. Surrendering rebels at the Rwanda-Congo border cite the radio program as their No. 1 reason for giving up the fight, relates Weiss. More broadly, Roma groups in Europe have approached him about creating antidiscrimination radio soaps in their countries, and Weiss would also like to bring similar programs to Bosnia and Israel. Radio La Benevolencija is also contemplating a television series template that could be used in different contexts. That way, when the threat of violence looms, the team would be ready to go.

“The so-called international community sits back and never does anything when there are early signs of genocide,” says Staub. “Yet they could do something before the violence happens, at much less cost in human lives and money.”

Meredith May is an award-winning feature writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. She also teaches journalism at Mills College.