Olá! I'm Alex Cole-Weiss, your West Coast Coordinator for USFT this year and I am so excited for all the amazing events and Fair Trade fun we've been planning and are going to plan! As your West Coast Coordinator, I am here to support y'all in any way that I can and I hope that we can all work together to put on some awesome events for our region.

If you want to know a little bit about me, I am a second year Geography student at UC Berkeley, love to salsa dance, and am always up for a conversation about pretty much anything. I spent three months after high school working for Fundación Chol-Chol (a Fair Trade organization) in Temuco, Chile, drink too much FT coffee, and hope to find more and more overlap and intersection between the growing food movement and fair trade. I love food and had the opportunity to go to Terra Madre, the international Slow Food event, this past fall. People all over the world are rocking ALL the movements, social justice, environmental, food, fair trade, political, and more!!

There are lots of ways to get involved with USFT and a lot of it depends on what your passion is and what you want to see happen. Want to get Fair Trade coffee in your dining hall? How about hosting a workshop on anti-oppression? Interested in studying the Fair Trade model abroad? Through USFT you can connect with other students who are engaged in similar efforts, share strategies and develop new ideas about how to accomplish your goals. We can also point you towards resources to host workshops and discussions about issues important to the movement and the world. And if you are looking for a hands-on Fair Trade oriented internship, I'd love to connect you to the Community Agroecology Network (CAN) and get you moving along that path.

Of course one of things I am most looking forward to this year is our 2nd annual "Strengthening the Roots" Superconvergence happening February 13th-15th at UC Santa Cruz.  This convergence is about addressing our goals, needs, and hopes and finding new and creative ways to approach challenges and find solutions. I hope to see you there: the more we can draw upon our collective capacities- creative, critical, collaborative-- the more enriching the experience and our efforts will be!  Check out the new and updated registration page http://www.usft.org/node/178. 

Let me know if you have things you're putting on at your school, in your town, (especially in the Bay Area!) or things you all would like to see and I'll share the word so we can make it happen!

Até logo,

Alex