Rainbow Turtle Rebooted Fair Trade Podcast Rainbow Turtle

In this episode I am delighted to be talking with Rachel Farey of the One World Shop in Edinburgh. It's a beautiful shop positioned at the western end of Princes Street in Edinburgh with the historic castle as a backdrop.Rachel has had an interesting journey that started with working with L'Arche after she left school. L'arche is an international federation of Non-profit organisations working to create networks of community where people with and without intellectual disabilities live and work...

In this episode we are playing a recording of a talk by Sally Sawaya of Meru Herbs in Kenya that she gave recently to the staff of True Origin and Rainbow Turtle in Paisley, Scotland. Sally is the managing director of Meru Herbs, the Kenyan fair trade company that produces tasty sauces, jams and herbal teas. Meru is a semi arid region of the country where, for many years, water was hard to obtain for farming and domestic use. Things changed just over 30 years ago with a collaboration between ...

In this episode we meet Mary Popple the current chair of JTS, the company that imports fair trade goods into Scotland and distributes them throughout the UK.Mary grew up in Northern Ireland during the 50s and 60s on the border between the republic and the north. Her father was a church minister who tried not to take sides and, as tensions increased, took his family to Scotland. Those early years in northern Ireland gave Mary a strong sense of the importance of equality and of treating people ...

In this episode we bring you part 2 of the John Riches interview. (If you've not heard it, do check out part 1 where John talks about his early life and influences.)We join John where he talks about setting up the Balmore Trust and The Coach House, instruments that were used to generate funds for overseas projects. Very quickly they got involved in buying products from people in small communities in Asia when they realised it was better to do that than give them grants. From there it was a sm...

In this episode, John tells interesting stories of working in a refugee camp in Austria after the 2nd world war, of being a chaplain at Cambridge University at the height of the student protests in the late 60s; working in the Transkei in South Africa during the apartheid era and meeting anti-apartheid activist, Steve Biko. He covers his time at Glasgow University teaching about the new testament in the bible and following a student out to Burmah to meet local villagers trying to live under t...

This short taster introduces Series 2 of the podcast. In this new series we'll be bringing you interviews with John Riches founder of JTS, Mary Popple of the St. Andrews Fair Trade Group and current chair of JTS and the Alternative Coffee Co. an exciting project that links fair trade speciality coffee farmers from Uganda and Rwanda with micro coffee roasters in the UK.