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Fair Trade Clothing

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Editor’s Note: The following story was written by a student in the Urban Youth International Journalism Program in partnership with Luke O’Toole Elementary School on Chicago’s South Side neighborhood.

Maureen Dunn went to India in 2004 and then started a clothes business.

She said the reason she made clothes in India was because the women and kids needed money for clothes themselves. So she made the business fair trade.
Fair trade is when someone gives somebody a deal: a fair wage, benefits such as health care and child care, and dignity and respect.

Dunn and two other friends, Michelle King and Jonit Bookheim, spent four months in India on the same trip. While Dunn was on the trip she fell in love with shopping in India. She then returned the next year to start her fashion company, Mata Traders. She named her company Mata Traders “because its name is ‘mom’ in Hindi.”

King and Bookheim supported Dunn when she started up Mata Traders, and they became official business partners.
Dunn really likes India. When I talked to her on the phone, I asked her what other things she makes beside clothes. “We make table mats, big earrings and some small,” she said.

To learn more about Dunn or her fashion, you can go to Mata Traders’ blog at: http://www.matatraders.com/blog/

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