Returning to our roots, living out our values.

Members of the SAWA Women Self Help Group conducting a meeting in Timau, Meru County, Kenya.

A year on from our rebrand, CEO Charlotte Timson reflects on the ways in which Transform Trade is putting its principles into action.

It’s been over a year since Transform Trade changed its name and rebranded from Traidcraft Exchange. But in many ways, our new identity isn’t new at all – it is a return to our roots as radical outsiders.

Traidcraft’s founder, Richard Adams, sought to create an alternative model of trade based on partnership, power-sharing and mutual accountability. His vision was of a trading system that modelled a different paradigm: where producers and retailers worked together on supply chains and bringing products to market, with no top-down siloed decision-making.

The international trade system was built on the exploitation of the majority world. It’s a model of doing business which places profit above all else, and which silences the voices of the people it relies upon.  

At the heart of trade injustice lies an imbalance of power – between large businesses that have accumulated extreme wealth and influence and producers and workers who are denied a fair deal.

It’s this imbalance of power we see mirrored within the aid and development system. This system too is rooted in neocolonialism. Often, models of aid are top down, and opaque to all but insiders, and do not centre the needs and voices of the people most impacted.

The aid and development sector, rightly, is taking steps to decolonise, to shift power, and to look at systemic change. As Transform Trade, we are collaborating with partners who like us want to create alternatives to the mainstream and to challenge deeply embedded power structures. These alternatives align more closely to our core values and enable us to put our founder’s vision of partnership and power sharing into action.  

Creating alternatives to conventional models

We’ve taken a long look at how our programmes, reporting, fundraising and campaigning work, and have embedded new ways of doing things– led by communities and putting the people we work with at the centre of everything we do. We listen to them, resource and support the organisations that represent them and create spaces for their voices to be heard.

In our programmes, we piloted new ways of funding farmers groups in Meru, Kenya, using participatory grant making. It’s early days, but farmers involved in the Kenya pilot report greater self confidence, with participants more willing to challenge injustice within the agricultural value chain, for example by negotiating prices and contracts. Alongside this, we opened a new fund – The Producer Fund – set up to make direct grants and provide support to small ethical businesses on their own terms. So far, we’ve raised over £200,000 to distribute to producer groups.

But these changes alone aren’t enough. To truly live our values, we needed to look beyond our programmes to how we fundraise, communicate, campaign and measure our impact. Established ways of doing things might be easy, but if they don’t align with our values, we need to find alternatives.   

In fundraising and communications, we decided to start with stories –letting the lived experiences of communities shape the campaigns and fundraising decisions we make. Rather than commissioning photography from a professional, we invested in a participatory photography project, Putting people’s stories first centres their knowledge, their priorities, and their own drive for change – reflecting our overall agenda of shifting power back to communities.

What we saw was that putting people’s stories and experiences first – asking questions, opening dialogues and rethinking the accepted ways of doing things – may take longer, but the results speak for themselves.

Living our values for the long term

It’s clear we have taken significant steps towards a radical new way of working, but real change is a process, not a one-off decision.

Whilst many INGOs are acknowledging the colonial legacies of aid and development, we’re taking concrete action to hand over real power in the decision-making process to the marginalised. Our focus is on learning through doing – and whilst we by no means have all the answers, we are confident that we are making positive progress.

In taking a step back to look at the bigger picture – the history and legacy of aid, trade and their links to colonialism and extraction of majority world resources-  we can challenge the systems which perpetuate inequality.

That step back has placed us back where we began – as radical outsiders, finding new ways of doing things which centre the experiences and needs of marginalized farmers, workers and producers, and creating alternatives to unjust systems in both trade and aid.