Fair Trade

For many artisans and farmers, handcrafting is the only option available to earn vital income to support their families.

Since 1949, SERRV International has believed in the critical role handcrafting plays in global employment. Our vision for a better world in the making® is driven by a belief in fair income for all.

For those whose work is limited by poverty or social circumstance, or where factory work and other employment options are unavailable, our fair trade business model has built sustainable income and opportunity.

Fair Trade Defined

Fair trade is a commitment to a fairer world— ensuring that people who make and grow products have a place to sell them, that they're fairly paid, and that their working conditions and communities are healthy.

For over 70 years, SERRV International has remained committed to fair trade's strictest codes of conduct, and to a triple bottom line of economic, environmental and social development. Our priorities are trading partnerships built on commitment, respect, transparency, and accountability.

Verified Fair Trade

As a founding member of the World Fair Trade Organization (1989) and the U.S. Fair Trade Federation (1994), SERRV has been a pioneer in the global fair trade movement. We continue to honor our responsibility to long-term partnerships— ensuring that we intimately know, monitor, and support each of our partner organizations.

SERRV's bi-annual Better World Partner Audit helps ensure adherence to our shared mission to build Sustainable Employment, Resources, Rights, and Vision within the small-scale artisan and farming communities. Learn more.

A Mission in a Name

Every letter in our name SERRV has purpose, and stands for an important part of our mission.

Sustainability

For SERRV, sustainability is so much more than environmental, and the "S" for Sustainability in our name inspires every aspect of our core mission. For our artisan and farmer partners to thrive, they need reliable economic, environmental, social, and intellectual opportunity.

When you buy fair trade, you help create that sustainability. Through steady orders, fair wages, and advance payment (50% at the time of order, and 50% when the order ships), SERRV supports small-scale global artisans and farmers as they build reliable income through handcrafting, wellness and prosperity through a healthy planet, social justice and self-sufficiency, & inspiration through cultural tradition and innovation.

Sustainable Employment

We believe in trade as a solution to global poverty— it's in our DNA. Fairly traded handcrafted products and foods help create employment for thousands of artisans and farmers worldwide.

By creating long term trading partnerships, artisans and farmers earn steady and reliable income where jobs are scarce.

Sustainable Resources

We believe in the power of our planet to teach and inspire prosperity. There's so much our planet can teach us, and we've listened. Nature inspires us, and we've seen lives transformed by little more than access to seed money and support for those seeds to grow. Our planet is a lifeline for the world's poor. By providing them with food, shelter, and raw materials for income, nature offers models of sustainability essential for ecological and economic prosperity.

By responsibly using the world around them, artisans and farmers can utilize fast growing grasses and woods, recycled materials, and more eco-friendly materials to create a reliable source of income through handcrafting.

Sustainable Rights

We believe that life isn't fair, but the way we treat each other can be. It's impossible to understand why so many people around the world struggle with poverty, and impossible to put ourselves in their shoes. But we believe each of us are able to care for others, and measurably happier when we do.

By supporting themselves through handcrafting, artisans and farmers living in the world's most remote regions and overpopulated cities can create steady employment and earn a fair wage for their work.

Sustainable Vision

We believe in the power of hope, but only when backed by a plan. Positive thinking is powerful, but hope is hard to have without opportunity, and that hope needs more than charity to happen. By empowering the poor to help themselves, we help reduce the effects of poverty for nearly 8,000 artisans and farmers worldwide.

By believing in their futures, artisans are able to build confidence in themselves and their work, and preserve cultural traditions while creating a better and brighter future for themselves and their communities.

Learn more about SERRV's mission and how you're helping make an impact for global artisans and farmers through fair trade.