So, you’ve just finished up your MBA and you’re ready to take on the business world with visions of power suits, power lunches and power plays dancing in your head. Where do you begin? What’s your first move?? If you’re Dubai-based Efua Mensa-Brown, you start by designing a clothing line.

Let’s back up a bit. Efua Mensa-Brown, though a lover of fashion, had never designed anything in her life–she spent years as a management consultant. The game changer? In 2008 while working on that MBA, Efua first learned about the atrocities of the $32 billion per year business of human trafficking. “It sounded like a movie–it couldn’t be real…I couldn’t wrap my head around it”,  she says. After graduating, she had the opportunity to go out and do practically anything she wanted (see aforementioned power-suited power lunches), but she couldn’t shake the feeling that she needed to do something with real meaning. She adds, “It sounds cheesy, but I wanted to change the world, make it a better place in any way that I could”. The issue of human trafficking kept haunting her. Doing her part to end it became her raison d’être.

So, how does one person change the world? Efua quips, “I know I can’t do it by myself! That I, Efua, will come to the rescue!” She decided to create something that people would easily buy, enabling her to donate a large portion of profits to an organization that is already working toward the goal of ending human trafficking. Completely undeterred by the fact that she was not a fashion designer, but knowing that women’s wear creates epic revenue streams (expected to exceed $621 billion in 2014, according to MarketLine), Efua ditched the proverbial power suit in favor of designing dresses.

It seemed a bit unorthodox at first. “Human trafficking”, Efua says, “is a dirty word. It’s a crime. How do I align this with fashion? With beauty? How do I give it meaning?” Efua optimistically believes that most humans want to make a difference and want to do good. She feels that she is offering a simple, everyday way for women of normal means to spend their clothing budget more meaningfully. It is a small step, but she feels that hundreds of women making small steps is just as effective as one person swinging for the fences.

Since she didn’t come from the fashion industry, her designs are simple, chic and imminently wearable–conceptual couture doesn’t make sense to her and, frankly, is not the demographic she’s after. Real women making a real difference–that’s Efua’s vision. Using fashion as a vehicle for awareness and change, she currently donates 20 percent of her profits to the A21 Campaign, chosen because of their global outlook and focus on major source countries of human trafficking.

The A21 website reveals that there are approximately 27 million men, women and children that are living in modern slavery. Twenty-seven MILLION. Sadly, only 1-2 percent of these victims are ever rescued from bondage. The site offers ways to get involved: by donating money, volunteering or interning. The site also has an extensive education library to help raise awareness of the problem. In January of 2014, they will be releasing a free downloadable version of their “Bodies Are Not Commodities” curriculum for high school students, which has been a pilot program up until now.

Efua’s line, aptly named Proverbs by Efua, is constructed of high quality, all-natural fabrics; primarily cottons and silks. Her first collection was black with pops of color; she says those pieces were “[…]about being in a dark place, but that there are always bright spots and people that help you in that time.” Her Fall/Winter 2013 line employs bold color, representing hope and a bright future (and just garnered a nice little blurb in the January 2014 edition of British Vogue).

And speaking of bright futures, what does Efua’s have in store? She plans to continue to stay true to her original idea of creating wearable fashion for a cause, but would love to expand into a lifestyle brand–shoes, sunglasses, and possibly even home wares.

Her wildest dream? “Wouldn’t it be nice if everything we bought contributed to a cause?”

All images courtesy Efua Mensa-Brown

Related on EcoSalon

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Fashioning Change Makes Shopping Sustainably a Whole Lot Easier
A Good Reason to Buy Something Useless

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I’m a cynic. I trust no one and no thing until, well until I’m good and ready. Especially when facts and figures about green and government, poverty and hunger, and other woes of the world get thrown around. I’m the first to stand back and wait. I don’t jump because I know that hype sells.

What I’m getting at is repeated so often it’s become cliche, but it still holds: the truth is hard to find. And once we do track it down, how true is it on the scale of truthfulness? Sometimes we want so badly to believe the good and have faith in the progress, that we don’t question. We just scoop up and run.

There are some things we were told, that we wholeheartedly took as truths – Come to find out, they told us wrong!

For example, supposedly we’re better fed and have fewer deaths from war and at least slavery is over and done with, right? Wrong. More Americans than ever are on food stamps, more people are dead from the conflict in eastern Congo than any war since WWII, and there are more slaves at work today than at any other time in history. Unbelievable. And real.

Why are we so willing to believe the people or organizations that distribute the erroneous information? Are we so gullible – or just too tired?

In moments where my heart begins to sink at the gravity of this realization, and I am prepared to throw my arms up in disbelief and hopelessness, I’m then inspired by my colleagues, the writers and friends and others I’ve met, online and off, who won’t swallow the information they are given as if it’s a free lunch. They question everything, and oh how I love people who question everything.

Here’s to gratitude and thoughtfulness in 2011.

Image _lmaji_

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I recently had the opportunity to attend a panel discussion about farmworker justice entitled, “The Fruits of Their Labor.”

Update 9/24/09: The panel was organized by CUESA, The Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture and they’ve posted a link to the audio files of the panel, so you can listen to the discussion yourself.

We’ve read about modern slavery in the tomato fields in Immokalee, Florida. You might ask why the situation in Florida would be any different than, for instance, the large farms in California’s Central Valley.

Turns out, what happens in Florida isn’t unique. Sexual harassment and abuse, non-payment, being forced to drink water from irrigation ditches, having no access to the fresh food harvested for others’ consumption, constant pesticide exposure, heat-related deaths, 12 to 14 hour work days and child labor are all routine in our agricultural system.

In addition, workers toil for an average yearly wage of $7,000-$10,000 per individual or $13,000 per family, without health insurance, sick pay or overtime. The people affected are powerless because they are often undocumented immigrants (often of indigenous heritage) from some of the poorest states in Mexico and Central America. The fact that people are willing to come here to work under such horrible conditions should give you a pretty good idea of how bad things are for poor people in their home countries.

The four panelists who spoke are all well-versed in different aspects of the food system as it relates to agricultural workers. They were: Sandy Brown, co-owner of Swanton Berry Farm; the first organic farm to contract with the UFW (United Farm Workers); Alida Cantor, of the California Institute for Rural Studies, a nonprofit research organization focused on farm labor conditions, rural health and sustainable food systems; Alegria De La Cruz, Staff Attorney for the Center for Race, Poverty, and the Environment, an environmental justice litigation organization; and Maisie Greenawalt, Vice President of Bon Appétit Management Company, which recently signed a ground-breaking agreement with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

Here are a few more statistics laid out by the panel:
“¢    Farmworkers today are generally young men who have left their families seeking work
“¢    50% have never seen a dentist
“¢    One-third have never seen a doctor
“¢    Agricultural workers toil under some of the most dangerous conditions of employment with 39.5 fatalities for every 100,000 employees in 2008.
“¢    Child labor in agriculture is legal. The Fair Labor Standards Act regarding child labor sets the minimum age of agricultural workers at 12 and 16 for everyone else.
“¢    California’s Central Valley has the 2nd worst air quality in the nation and 1 in 4 children there have asthma.

It kind of takes the pleasure out of eating, doesn’t it?

And unfortunately, if you think buying organic, locally-raised food from the farmers’ market means that the workers who harvested your food were treated fairly, it’s not necessarily a given.

The whole idea of social justice has only recently begun to be talked about in sustainable food circles. It’s true that some owner-operated organic farms do treat their workers well, but nothing requires them to do so. After all, profits are low; the farmers themselves have a hard time making a living and they have to compete in the marketplace.

So: You don’t want bad juju in your food caused by the horrible conditions under which the people who harvested it work. What can you do about it?

One of the things that was suggested in the panel was to go ahead and ask the farmers you buy your food from about worker treatment. Start by saying something like, “Who works for you, and how many people do you employ?” “How do you keep a stable workforce?” or anything non-confrontational to start the conversation. It may seem hard to ask about such personal things, but you have a right to know – just like you have a right to know if your food was sprayed with pesticides. One of the panelists brought up the fact that 10 years ago it seemed awkward to ask if the produce was organic.

This approach is only part of the picture, however.

As Americans (especially eco-minded ones), we’re inclined to think we can shop ourselves out of any problem. Voting with your fork won’t do the trick here, though it might make you feel better and nudge a few farmers toward treating their workers better.

The fact is, farmers – especially small, organic ones – don’t have it so easy in this system, either. How can they actually provide others with a living wage when they barely make on themselves? How can they provide their workers with health insurance when they can’t afford it for their families? These questions point to systemic changes that are needed in the areas of agriculture subsidies, health care, trade policies that cause people to seek work in the U.S. in the first place, and finally, immigration reform.

On a hopeful note, all the panelists had thoughts on things farmers could do to treat workers better that cost little to no money. The panelists have all asked farmworkers about what kinds of things would make their lives better. The answers won’t surprise you because they are really the same things we all need in our daily interactions with our supervisors and fellow workers.

“¢    Being treated like a whole person with hopes, dreams, plans for the future
“¢    Clear, respectful communication
“¢    A clear grievance policy
“¢    Flexible schedules
“¢    Worker safety measures
“¢    Shared decision-making
“¢    Occasional team-building activities like potlucks

None of these things cost much money and farmers who implement them say that they have a stable, productive workforce year after year.

Good food should be clean, and healthy for the people eating it and the planet. We’re working hard on that. Now we need to start including social justice in our conception of what sustainable food is. That means starting the conversation with each other, the people from whom we buy our food and our elected officials who set food policy.

I’ll end with a photo gallery of farmworker’s lives from The Migrant Project.

Image: ajawin

This is the latest installment in Vanessa Barrington’s weekly column, The Green Plate, on the environmental, social, and political issues related to what and how we eat.

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