When did you establish the non-profit fair trading organisation Trade Aid, and why?
I co-founded Trade Aid with my husband, Richard, in 1973. We’d spent two years in India working with Tibetan refugees, where we learnt that the sale of handicrafts was one of their sources of income. I wanted to import and sell some of their work when we returned to New Zealand, so we decided to start a non-profit organisation. That’s when the Trade Aid idea was born. We didn’t need to make a profit because Richard is a lawyer and I was at home having my third child. It had nothing to do with making a living and everything to do with supporting the Tibetan refugees. Then it spread to many other groups in several countries, from Bangladesh to Ethiopia. What aspect of Trade Aid has the greatest carbon footprint? People focus negatively on our importation of products from around the world, but we bring everything here by sea, so actually we have an incredibly low carbon footprint in terms of consumption of resources. How has your organisation changed over the years? In the beginning we si
