Other Projects
In 2000, Rathke created the Organizers' Forum, which brings together senior organizers in labor and community organizations in dialogues about challenges faced by constituency-based organizations, such as tactical development, organizing new immigrants, using technology, utilizing capital strategies and corporate campaign techniques, or understanding the impacts and organizing challenges of globalization. The Organizers' Forum international dialogues have involved more than 300 organizers over the last 10 years with visits to Brazil, India, South Africa, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Turkey, Russia, Australia, and Egypt creating a global network of union and community organizers.
In 2011 Rathke purchased the Fair Grinds Coffeehouse in New Orleans, the only 100% fair trade coffeehouse in the city for the last 10 years and the coffeehouse voted #1 in New Orleans in the readers poll of the weekly Gambit Magazine. Rathke set up the ownership as a low-profit limited liability corporation (L3C) to operate as a "social venture" business donating profits and available gross revenues to support organizing in developing countries, including South and Central America where the coffee is imported. Fair Grinds under Rathke now gets its fair trade directly from the Port of New Orleans to benefit local jobs and union workers and roasts locally as well
Read more about this topic: Wade Rathke
Famous quotes containing the word projects:
“One of the things that is most striking about the young generation is that they never talk about their own futures, there are no futures for this generation, not any of them and so naturally they never think of them. It is very striking, they do not live in the present they just live, as well as they can, and they do not plan. It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for a future, none at all.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“But look what we have built ... low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace.... Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums.... Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.”
—Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)