We know chocolate is a good cure for the blues…Today, costumed kids and adults in in 300 cities across America, including Baristaville are treating neighbors to Fair Trade dark chocolate in the name of a good cause.
The reverse trick-or-treat Halloween program is an outreach effort to educate consumers about problems of chronic poverty in cocoa-growing communities, abysmal working conditions, and the use of exploited child labor in the Ivory Coast – which produces 40% of the world’s cocoa.
In Baristaville, the effort is spearheaded by Fair Trade advocates, Grace Grund and Stephanie Sheerin organizing groups of children from Glen Ridge, Montclair, Nutley, Maplewood and Bloomfield, including students from the Montclair High School Fair Trade Club and members of the Park United Methodist Church Youth Group.


“It’s wonderful to be working with teens, committed to this cause, and concerned about globalization issues, child labor, and poverty. The kids are impressive, eloquent, and fierce,” says Sheerin. It’s the first year of the program. From the ReverseTrickorTreat.org press release:

The International Institute for Tropical Agriculture for USAID estimates 284,000 children work in abusive child labor conditions on cocoa farms in West Africa, the world’s largest cocoa producer, and that 64% of those children are under 14 years old.
The Fair Trade chocolate is provided by Equal Exchange, a full service provider of high quality, organic coffee, tea, cocoa, chocolate and healthy snacks to grocery stores, restaurants and places of worship nationwide.

For more info, contact Stephanie Sheerin: stephaniesheerin@hotmail.com

5 replies on “How About A Reverse Trick-or-Treat?”

  1. How dare these socialists hold their children hostage to their own political views. This is just a cheap political stunt orchestrated by George Soros, Alec Balwin that fat ass Rosie O’Donnell and all those other liberal elite Bush haters out there who can’t stand the fact that this president is the most successful president in American history. Why, if we don’t stop this horrible persecution of these Christians who are just trying to exercise their Constitutional right to live in a Christian Society and bomb Iran right now, we will have jihadists running up and down Main Street, dressed in those funny costumes they wear, forcing our women to have abortions!
    Why, if we didn’t give those people in Africa something to do with their time, they’ll be flooding across the border to “make chocolate”–if you know what I mean–right here in our own backyards. Not only does Hillary Clinton want this, she wants them to give them welfare checks as pay off for their votes, so the Democrat Congress can keep raising your taxes and declare defeat in Iraq. Why don’t these Bush Halloween haters support our troops? Did you know they didn’t have Halloween in Iraq when Hitler ran the country? Can you believe that? And that’s why we are there, fighting for Democracy, so we can go trick or treating here in our SUVs because in Europe they have, like, $10 a gallon gas and socialized medicine, so they can’t have Halloween either. They should put all these liberal socialists sodomites down in Gitmo, behind the barbed wire, and them them eat chocolate. Because that’s what Barack Hussien Osama Bin Laden wants, for America to fail so we can’t keep wearing our American flag lapel pins on Halloween to let everyone know that we don’t like Islamofascism and the liberals who secretly hate America.

  4. For all your attempted bullyragging above, guido santa (an observation you attempt to block others from making by decrying their own “bullying”), you say very little. As is your wont.
    An exceptionally stupid post from you today. And nowhere near as “satirical” as you imagined it would prove. I recommend some brown sugar, straight, with a chaser of powdered sugar. Then, and only then, you should go trick-or-treating, in the same haplessly sputtering mood your post conveys. Why are your feathers so ruffled? Because homeowners invariably say “Trick” to you in response to your annual challenge?
    Y’all have a nice All Saints Day and All Souls Day, too, no matter how the very thought of the religious impulse seems to send you into paroxysms of frothing.

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