A coalition of churches, synagogues, mosques, and cultural organizations located in the Inland Empire. Unfortunately, without any up-to-date number of members in this coalition.
For the org. there is a spiritual connection linking the desert landscapes and religious beliefs. Their primary focus is congregating more groups around environmental hazards in desert lands.
The organization is looking for a “new dimension and depth” in the discussion about the environmental crisis. Engaging in different fields:
Desert Stewardship Project is an interfaith coalition dedicated to protecting the deserts of California.
The gift of the money caused discord in the community - rather than buying the good tea for a better price, so that it feels earned, it is a bigger power dynamic to gift the money
The publication of standards, inspections, certification, decertification, branding - connection to policy for organic certification
I don’t think they particularly see themselves as helpful to the tea growers - they are more about codifying/enacting a “final vocabulary” around their view of environmental sustainability
In the context of a supply chain where the Global North [sic] corp/buyer is at the top, they are defining and enacting “the ethical” and environmental “responsibility” in their standards and their inspections and their certifications and labels and branding, without any real awareness of how these things are already happening, for different reasons, in the context of somewhere like Tanzania where the tea is actually being grown.
Standards development organizations, which include heavy influence from corporations in the Global North [sic], are “codify[ing] values of sustainability that are to govern practices” p825
Not much on the context of CSR or the history of these SDOs and why they exist.