Becoming a Citizen-Consumer Board Director of Equal Exchange
By Ciara Mulcahy
I was elected to the board of Equal Exchange in June 2020, a couple days after my 22nd birthday. The prior year, I had attended the Equal Exchange Summit as a college student who really liked healthy food and desperately wanted a glimmer of hope that some businesses could benefit people and the environment. I knew that I enjoyed Equal Exchange’s products and vaguely understood that the way they traded with the farmers and producers of their products was better than most other food companies in the United States. But if someone had asked me where my food came from, I probably would have considered this a botanical question. I could guess whether certain produce grew on a tree, vine or plant and what climate it might be found in. I had not really considered the people who plant, tend, harvest and process those crops for their livelihoods.
Discovering Equal Exchange
Purchasing my fruit and vegetables from Haymarket in Boston was my first glimpse into the distribution system that feeds the grocery retail stores. On Fridays and Saturdays year-round, vendors sell the fruits and vegetables that regional grocery stores had not bought from the produce distribution center the previous week. I loved the bustle and noise of the open, cash-only marketplace, so I went there to buy affordable produce for my friends almost every weekend of my junior and senior years. My parents visited Boston for Parents’ Weekend my junior year, so I brought them to Haymarket. That Saturday morning exhibited the typical horrendous weather of late-October in Boston. As freezing rain pelted us, I desperately searched for nearby coffee shops. Fortunately, we quickly discovered the Equal Exchange Cafe and hustled the few blocks for warm, comforting cups of coffee. The smells of the coffee shop brought me back to the fellowship hall of my church back home. I remembered that back in elementary school, while most of my church friends would dart over to the refreshment table for free donuts, I would try to persuade my parents that they needed bags of Equal Exchange coffee so that I could ask for a bar of chocolate as they were checking out. Then, in fourth grade, I spoiled the suspense of our classroom’s weeklong game of “Secret Santa” on the last day, by being the only one in our class who would give an Equal Exchange hot cocoa mix as the best gift they could imagine for Secret Santa.
I visited the Equal Exchange café again after the Parents’ Weekend and saw a placard on the tables for their annual summit, the following June in Newton, Massachusetts. I must have filled out my information because I got an email reminder a few weeks before the event and decided to go. Only recently in 2023, I found out that I had never officially signed up for the summit, but when I showed up they welcomed me with open arms nonetheless. I met kind people from all walks of life who shared in the passion for everything related to food justice, from ethical trade to sustainable land use to food waste. I particularly enjoyed Joe Maxwell’s speech about the non-competitive monopolization of the meat industries in the United States and how it was causing loss of job opportunities in rural areas and a lack of resilience in the food sector. I felt like I belonged in the group assembled at the summit. They cared about people and had the knowledge and experience of previous successful activism to reinforce their convictions. After the event, I stayed engaged with Equal Exchange during my senior year, attending occasional educational webinars about the different product categories.
At the 2020 Equal Exchange Virtual Summit, I caught up with the friends I had made the previous year and refueled my passion for food justice. In the year between the summits, Equal Exchange had changed its bylaws to allow for up to 3 positions on their board to be elected and held by the “Citizen-Consumer” group, people who like EE products and care about their mission. My platform during the election process was that I cared about what EE was about and I was willing to learn how to serve Equal Exchange and support their mission. I soon realized this would be a three-year find-your-own-adventure crash course on an ethical business model within the modern food economy.
First Board Meeting
At my first EE Board meeting in June 2020, our main concern was the wellbeing of the farmer-partner groups around the world. Equal Exchange has decades-long trade partnerships with their farmer-partner cooperative groups and negotiates prices even above fair-trade premium prices, well in advance of the harvest seasons. Because Equal Exchange accepts this risk for each season, the farmer-partners make sure that Equal Exchange is offered the highest quality products and priority shipments in advance of other coffee, cacao, sugar, fruit and nut buyers. Despite all the shortages and shipping challenges that many businesses were facing at the time, Equal Exchange managed to maintain its seasonal availability of products. While the hotels and cafes were ordering much less, we watched in amazement as EE customers themselves began ordering bulk coffee and foods from Equal Exchange directly and sharing it among friends, community groups and buying clubs to sustain the mission through a disruptive year.
Even if I had had a business background, which might have helped with the normal corporate board roles, it would have taken me a few board meetings to grasp all the specifics of being an ethical trade organization and a worker-owned cooperative. Equal Exchange’s greatest strength is its Worker-Owners and the governance model that empowers them. At worker-owner meetings, each worker-owner has one vote on decisions such as major changes of operations, ratifying the election of Citizen-Consumer board directors (such as me in 2020), and proposing amendments to company bylaws. Each Worker-Owner owns one share, regardless of role, and receives an equal portion of each year's profits.
In Spring 2021, I enrolled in the Equal Exchange’s internal Leadership and Training course for Worker-Owners who are interested in election for leadership positions, such as serving on the Board of Directors or as the Worker-Owner coordinator. The course included an introduction to business finance, a description of their non-traditional business model as a worked-owned co-op, the history of Equal Exchange (how they got involved with the products they sell), non-violent communication skills and a mock board meeting. Worker-Owners all experience a version of this during their first year at Equal Exchange so that they can be informed on votes about operations and lead effective discussions at Worker-Owner meetings, but much of the content was new to me. That course was an inflection point in my participation with Equal Exchange. I quickly grew to understand and feel more comfortable in my role on the board of Equal Exchange and began to turn my attention towards my role as a consumer of food in the United States.
Continued Connections
Over the past three years, being a Citizen-Consumer on the Board of Equal Exchange helped me connect with people that were reengaging with where their food comes from in many different ways. I recognized the bright red bulk coffee bags when I visited our sourdough pastry baker from the farmer’s market in rural Virginia. She described how she uses Equal Exchange for the coffee-flavored filling of her delicious cruffins. Later, when I mentioned that I was on the Equal Exchange board to people at a Ten Thousand Villages store, they described the different artisan groups who made the items throughout the store. Within the food and ethical trade communities, being affiliated with Equal Exchange distinguished me as someone who understands and cares about farmers and artisans. It also started many interesting discussions with people about how they were breaking from the mold of the conventional food system, by planting a garden or avoiding certain foods or going to their local farmers market or switching to healthier alternatives. Through the recommendations of foodie people I met, I have watched dozens of food-related documentaries. My experience and learnings with Equal Exchange have helped my personal interests in food and health expand into sharing resources or recipes with friends and family members who are exploring beyond typical American cooking and eating.
“What started with separate individuals concerned about their health or impact, has coalesced into a sparse, but real network of friends sharing what they want and solutions they find. As the food businesses that shape our lives become increasingly universal, I have found that we have way more shared concerns and experiences than we have differences. Across geographies and generations, we can learn from each other and learn to address challenges in the food experience together.”
Equal Exchange operates in product markets that have some of the worst histories of human rights abuses. The United States consumers acquired their taste for Cavendish bananas, Haas avocados, coffee, cocoa, and sugar from the legacy of slavery-like plantations and industrial agriculture operations throughout the Global South. To avoid perpetuating this continuation of violence or injustice, Equal Exchange chooses to primarily trade with farmer-partners that have organized into cooperatives themselves. Although coffee, cacao, sugar, tropical fruits and nuts are often treated as commodities, they have beautiful, nuanced flavors that are best cultivated in the environments, elevations and climates of their natural habitats. These plants and foods require the attention, engagement and stewardship that only smallholder farmers can provide. This makes the quality of specialty foods inherently resistant to industrialization or plantation-style production. As individual farmers cannot yield enough crop on their own for export, they benefit from the distribution, knowledge-sharing and stability of organizing into producer cooperatives. For instance, beginning in 2010, Equal Exchange participated in a USAID project to help cacao producers evaluate and certify the quality of the cacao they grow. Equal Exchange’s worker-owners frequently travel to their farmer-partner groups and the leaders of the farmer-partner groups often speak to the Citizen-Consumer group of Equal Exchange through video calls or in-person meetups.
Mutual Trust
Many food and other consumer product businesses try to convince people that their business is sustainable and/or ethical. In contrast, Equal Exchange does not spend excessively on marketing or branding. Unnecessary advertising would detract from the finances they could allocate for buying quality food products from farmer-partner cooperatives. Instead, the Equal Exchange Worker-Owners are collectively intentional about upholding the values with which they were founded 37 years ago. Equal Exchange’s Articles of Organization even includes a clause stating that if they were ever acquired by another organization they would give their assets away to an alternate, ethical trade organization that is better aligned with the Equal Exchange mission. This policy is effectively a self-destruct button to safeguard against acquisition. This Banksy-esque “No sellout” clause selects for intentional investors and assures the Worker-Owners that Equal Exchange will not be transferred to less mission-driven ownership.
Four years ago, when I first heard about Equal Exchange’s “No Sellout” clause, I did not really understand how important it was. It took me a few years of having people I meet be shocked that “just a consumer” would be entrusted with a board seat to realize that Equal Exchange sharing that power was a radical step. But I have also learned that Equal Exchange has a history of trusting consumers. Back when the cooperative was forming, the founders had to believe that the United States coffee consumers would care about people they did not know, despite ignorance or prejudice. In fact, the Worker-Owners trusting that we will continue to care gives us, the Citizen-Consumers, an opportunity to taste foods procured with pride and learn enough to care, appreciate and empower the people who grow our food thousands of miles away.