There’s a pretty high chance that you’ve never heard of SERRV.  I never had until I saw one of their boxes in the storage room of the bakery.  J.P. & Michelle had casually mentioned that we were switching basket suppliers in the past but I didn’t pay much attention to it.  Then I started looking at the tags on the baskets as well as the fliers in their office.

If I may brag on them for a second, let me tell you that we’ve got some cool bosses here at the bakery.  They bend over backwards to accommodate our vacation days (next week we’ve got five different customer service people out the entire week and they would still say yes if another one asked for the week off).  They pay us more than minimum wage and I’ve not once in 5½ years heard them complain about it.   But, even more than that, they’re generous outside of these walls.

We could get baskets a little cheaper from other suppliers but J.P. & Michelle decided that the lives of the people making the baskets were just as important as the lives of the people making the bread.  SERRV provides a living wage to the artisans who make the baskets as well as teaching them how to properly price their products, taking into account everything we in the developed world do for ours (labor, not just materials, etc.).

Here’s a blurb from their website:

From a small group of church relief workers helping refugees rebuild after World War II, SERRV has grown into a $9.5 million fair trade network connecting thousands of artisans in developing countries with customers and volunteers across the United States.

As Sunil Chitrakar, director of SERRV’s partner Mahaguthi in Nepal, said, “Longer than many of our lives, SERRV has served humankind!...SERRV made history; becoming one of very few organizations who served more than five decades for the artisans and producers around the world. It started as an idealistic dream to help the poor and turned into Fair Trade.”

So, feel good about a gift basket you buy here.  It’s not only a gift to the person you give it to but to the person in the Third World country that made it as well!