While most college graduates dream of climbing the professional ladder and making the big bucks, not our client Dan Parris of Speak Up Productions, he is preparing to live on $1.25 a day or less. In these economic times there’s frugal and then there’s extreme documentary film making. According to the World Bank 1.4 billion people live in extreme poverty, the subject of the documentary entitled Give a Damn. St. Louis suburbanite filmmakers Dan Parris, Rob Lehr, David Peterka, and cameraman Tim Peterka are packing their A/V equipment and hitchhiking to Africa, voluntarily, to experience poverty. Starting from St. Louis on July 4, 2009 the documentary team will film their journey from America through East Africa living on $1.25 as they document the truths, causes, and whether Americans should Give a Damn when it comes to extreme poverty.
Watch the Give a Damn documentary trailer
Experiencing the privileges of a St. Louis, Missouri West County life Parris and Lehr grew up in Ballwin, Marquette High School grads while the Peterka brothers lived down the road in Manchester graduating from Parkway West High School. In their undergraduate pursuits all four graced the halls of St. Louis Community College at Meramec. After separate trips to Africa Parris and David Peterka returned home searching for answers. Why is Africa the most impoverished nation and why Americans are apathetic toward resolving the underlying causes? Lehr met their concern for extreme poverty with extreme skepticism “Why should I give a damn about poverty in Africa?” And thus, over coffee at Denny’s the film plot was born. Three friends, one skeptic and two activists, hitch to Africa to discover the truth about poverty and why they should care. From that conversation trailers and production information was created and posted to giveadamndoc.com. The rest will soon be documentary history.
“Our hope is to make a humorous, adventurous documentary compelling the next generation to make fighting extreme poverty and injustice a priority in their lives,” said Parris a graduate of the Biola University film school, the film’s producer, and one of three main characters.
In preparing for the film, the team has been interviewing noted African and poverty experts as well as conducting “man on the street” interviews with the average American to include in the documentary. When they depart on July 4th, they will hitchhike across America to New York City, fly to London, England on to Athens, Greece jumping a ferry to Cairo, Egypt, before flying to Kenya. Once in Kenya the team will hitchhike through East Africa with planned stops in Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. Aside from the flights into Africa, the mission is to live in extreme poverty in the U.S., Europe and Africa connecting the experience of poverty worlds apart through travel. The trip is expected to take four months.
The team has spent a successful year focused on raising funds for gear, and flights as well as poverty fighting project contacts to film during their journey. Additional donations to the project in the form of contacts working on poverty issues, locals on the ground, and lodging along the team’s travel path, in addition to monetary donations, are still needed.
For more information about the upcoming feature length film Give a Damn, the production company Speak Up Productions, the documentary team, or to make a tax deductible donation visit giveadamndoc.com or e-mail giveadamndoc@gmail.com.
by admin on March 5, 2009
There is a fair trade boil-over brewing around the entry of corporate giants into the fair trade market place. The latest entry is chocolate giant Cadbury. Dunkin’ Donuts, Starbucks, McDonalds and Nestle’s entry into fair trade have stired the pot as well. Cadbury’s deal to certify their Dairy Milk bars as fair trade continues to raise complicated questions about fair trade and who is a fair trader. A slope that can be made slippery to be sure, and one with an outcome sure to affect the lives and wallets of many.
The Guardian Newspaper’s Bibi van der Zee nut-shelled the problem this way:
“What is the problem here? As far as the Fairtrade Foundation is concerned there is probably no problem at all – they want to increase demand and now, hurray, they have. But the fairtrade movement is a broad one, which long predates the existence of the Fairtrade Foundation and its label, and many members of that movement will be feeling some of the unease over this deal that they felt over the deal with Nestle. There are two central problems. Firstly the Fairtrade chocolate producers like Divine have been slowly but surely carving out this market for a decade or so now. And here come great big Cadbury with their massive distribution, their hierarchical structures, their huge marketing budgets … and possibly blows them all out of the water. Is that fair?” Full article and reader comments.
The Fair Trade movement with its many leading organizations struggles to unify efforts to mount one powerful and cohesive message/campaign, thereby diffusing the momentum. The current standards most Fair Traders follow are defined by the World Fair Trade Organization, – formerly International Fair Trade Organization – are focused on transactions with producers in the “developing” world to marketers and consumers in the “developed” world. Brief on the 10 standards.
No doubt with 75% of the world’s population living on less than a dollar a day mainly residing in the “developing” regions of the world (World Bank), and an estimated 27 million living in slavery due to improvised circumstances (Kevin Bales), the bulk of our attention as fair traders should be on leveling the playing field of opportunities for those with the least and the least opportunities to get out of poverty. That is what Fair Trade is about, eliminating poverty through fair trade.
However, we can not lose sight of the need for fair trade in the “developed” regions of the world. To be a fair trader means the entire process is transparent, all are receiving a fair and living wage, there is health and safety in the work environment, gender equality exists for all, and practices and materials healthy for the environment are in use. With the global economic crisis pushing on all of us, and pushing the “developing” world further into poverty, fair trade in the “developed” world would go a long way to eradicating the greed, corruption, and inequalities jump starting the cycles of poverty in the first place.
I challenge those of you in the “developed” world to be the tipping point by choosing to adopt the 10 fair trade standards in your place of work and by voting for fair trade with your dollars when you shop. The benefits to people, your profit, and the planet are enormous. Conscious consumerism is rising even faster in this time of economic crisis. If you are going to part with your money it difficult times, you want it to go as far is it can. What could be farther than a living wage for the producer and a better environment? As a company adopting fair trade and green strategies increases productivity, reduces costs, and provides real news for PR and marketing campaigns. This is our mission at P3 Strategies, transitioning organizations from single to triple bottom line success for people, profit, and the planet (P3) through successful green and fair trade organizational and fair trade models. For daily fair trade and P3 ideas join me and many other fair traders and socially responsible business thinkers on Twitter.
