What are your rights?

Celebrating World AIDS Day

"This 20th World AIDS Day provides opportunities for both celebration and concern. Celebration because worldwide, fewer people are being infected with HIV and fewer people are dying from AIDS. Finally.
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Twenty years ago, some ten million people were living with HIV. Since then, the epidemic has more than tripled in size. And it is still growing. For every two people who start making treatment today, another five become newly infected. So instead of getting shorter, the queues of people requiring antiretroviral therapy are getting longer and longer. There is thus as real and urgent a need as ever for a brilliant and diverse coalition that is ready to lead and deliver on AIDS." - Dr Peter Piot Executive Director of UNAIDS

Give Festive, Choose Fair, Naturally at The Body Shop

The count down is on ? 1 month until Christmas Day ? a time when we shower our loved ones with gifts, joy and love. In preparation for this festive season our retail team had a meeting. We shared goals, expectations, and motivated everyone for a memorable 4 weeks to come. To create awareness and also to motivate all, I shared with the team a video from our Activist TV ? DVD 2 on Children on the Edge.

Its been 6 months since I returned home from East Timor, and I was overwhelmed by my own emotions from seeing this video again, the memories flooded back, along with the tears (and there was a lot) and again I found the need to move and inspire the team to make a difference, to be heard and seen and importantly to make a difference.

Children on the Edge exists for the most vulnerable and marginalised child worldwide, ensuring they are heard and are not invisible, are protected and have their needs met, advocating for all of their rights in accordance with the principles and provisions of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child

This year buy a loved one, family and friends a Tri Massager from the Body Shop ? Australia. They retail at $11.95 and approx $9.60 is profit.

All the proceeds from the sale of this groovy gadget will be donated to Children On The Edge (COTE) East Timor Programme, creating play space for children affected by post war trauma. A small wooden massage tool makes a huge difference to the lives of hundreds of children that use the centre in the village of Viqueque. As consumers don't under estimate the power that you have.

You can also go direct to the Children On The Edge website and donate directly to the East Timor, and keep updated with the amazing work they are doing in 9 countries.

Not only is this a gift that will give to the children of Timor you will be supporting the community trade partner Teddy Export - which makes the Tri Massager for The Body Shop.

To learn more about Teddy Exports visit: http://www.teddyexports.net/ along with The Body Shops' other community trade partners.

For those that have experienced East Timor share your stories, passion and get others inspired.

Feliz Natal, Feliz Anu Novu! Happy Christmas & Happy New Year.

Katie - The Glen

White Ribbon Day

Chocolate, Child Labour and Child Sex Trafficking

1. The Body Shop?s strong commitment to human rights means all our suppliers must verify they don?t use child labour.
   
   
2. We will be launching a campaign in August with Child Wise, Australia?s leading child protection agency, to eliminate the especially heinous crime of child sex trafficking.
   
   
3. About 70% of the chocolate we eat comes from cocoa beans farmed in West Africa. Sadly, thousands of children are being trafficked and forced into labouring on these cocoa farms. Since 1996 we?ve been supporting a fair and ethical alternative, by buying Community Trade cocoa beans from Kuapa Kokoo Ltd Cooperative in Ghana. The Body Shop uses cocoa in many products, including our famous body butters. We pay a fair price as well as a social premium, so farmers can afford to send their children to school and not to work.
   
   
4. We encourage all our staff to purchase fair trade coffee, tea and chocolate and participate in World Vision's Don't Trade Lives campaign. Many do and go so far as to outlaw "slave bars" from their store's back room.
   

1. We all eat chocolate and drink tea or coffee. Buy products with the fair trade label and you can rest assured that no child labour was used in making the product.
   
   
2. Contact your favourite chocolate manufacturer and ask them to adopt World Vision Australia?s recommendations to end child labour in the production of the cocoa they buy.
   
   
3. Watch and promote through your circles of influence, the new child trafficking videos I've embeded below from World Vision. Bubbles of Nothing is about the real cost of chocolate. I love it! It's cheeky, original and very effective at getting the message across! Postcard from Narak, Cambodia gives us the opportunitiy to see the issue of child trafficking from the front line. Narak's story touches on the issues of unemployment, poverty, land mines, domestic violence and trafficking but also shows you the positive impact you, via NGOs working in developing countries, can make.
   

Our humanitarian responsibility

?I still have, and I always will I think, a nearly uncontainable rage about what happened in Rwanda, in Somalia and in many other parts of the world and about what's happening now in many parts of the world. To see mothers and fathers and children dying of indifference, dying of neglect, of abuse, of somebody's political calculation, that that doesn't matter. It fills me first of all with just profound sorrow that they have to live that and die it. And then it fills me with rage, frankly. And the question then is what do you do? What do you do with that?? - Dr James Orbinski

?We are responsible for our lives and for our world. And if we don't engage that responsibility, no one else will and we will live or die with a legacy of our failures.? - Dr James Orbinski

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