With fall and the holidays ahead, Oak Park has garnered a gift store with a difference. And making a difference.
Ten Thousand Villages Oak Park, a new store featuring fair trade goods from artisans around the world, opened on Friday at 121 N. Marion St.
The Oak Park store is part of a group of over 100 outlets around the country. The non-profit organization, founded in 1946, is a program of the Mennonite Central Committee, based in Akron, Pennsylvania, and a founding member of the International Fair Trade Association. Ten Thousand Villages Oak Park raises money for operations, and the national program gives the store its brand. In return, the Oak Park store must buy at least 85 percent of its products from the national organization.
The effort to open a store in Oak Park began in September 2005, when a group including Wil Rutt, currently chair of the Oak Park store, held an interest meeting at the Oak Park Public Library. Two years later, the store is open, after the board raised $150,000 and over 100 volunteers spent 1,000 hours preparing the store.
The village government also pitched in, granting the store $11,300 for build-out, and the board secured a line of credit at a favorable interest rate from the Oak Park Development Corporation through Community Bank.
Ten Thousand Villages pays unemployed and underemployed artisans around the world a price that they calculate will cover shelter, food, and education for their families. The cost customers pay, said regional sales manager Betty Hartzler, includes the price paid to artisans and shipping. The Oak Park store then adds to the price to cover its costs–usually adding another 50 percent to the artisan and shipping costs, Hartzler said.
Hartzler said that Ten Thousand Villages often works with women. “They may get more respect from their husbands” with wages, she said. The non-profit also pays half the price of an order in advance, and does not increase or decrease the amount ordered from a collective by more than 10 percent per year so that the artisans can depend on consistent work. Hartzler added that despite Ten Thousand Villages’ Mennonite ties, it is not a religious organization, and works with everyone from Hindus to Muslims to Christians. “Poverty doesn’t know any religion,” she said.
Rutt, a retired physician who has traveled widely and once ran a hospital in Haiti, said that fair trade is important because it is “a social justice issue. Human beings should be justly compensated for their labor.”
The Oak Park store features a multitude of fair trade products–“over 1,800 different kinds of items,” said Rutt. Among the highlights are gongs and river stones from Vietnam, onyx from Pakistan, mats from the Philippines, drums from Kenya, and Equal Exchange coffee and chocolate.
The store is always looking for volunteers, Rutt said. Their Web site is www.oakpark.tenthousandvillages.com.