For some trick-or-treaters, this Halloween will be a holiday of giving as well as receiving. As they make their way from house to house, these costumed messengers will be handing out Fair Trade-certified chocolate attached to a card explaining Fair Trade and how it can help solve the labor and environmental problems in today's global cocoa industry.

Called Reverse Trick-or-Treating, this program is an initiative of Global Exchange, a membership-based international human rights organization dedicated to promoting social, economic and environmental justice around the world. In its third year, Reverse Trick-or-Treating aims to raise awareness of the pervasive problems of child labor, forced labor and trafficking in the cocoa fields - and to empower consumers to press the chocolate industry for more fair cocoa sourcing policies and inform them about Fair Trade companies that are leading the way to industry reform. And between 10 and 20 thousand groups of children across the U.S. and Canada are expected to take part this year, according to Global Exchange.

More than half a dozen area churches, as well as Downtown's HOPES Center, are participating in this year's Reverse Trick-or-Treating program. Each congregation, plus some individual families, will take part in their own way.

At Evangelical United Methodist Church, for example, the congregation's youth incorporated Reverse Trick-or-Treating into its annual Halloween Bash, which took place last Wednesday. Fair Trade chocolate and information about Fair Trade practices was handed out to more than 100 youth participating in the event with hopes that they would take it home and share it with their families, said Devin Tharp, youth minister at EUM Church.

This is the second year that Tharp has worked Reverse-Trick-or-Treating into the church's youth event. Last year, he was also involved on a family level when his then 2-year-old son, Lleyton, handed out Fair Trade chocolate and information to his neighbors as he made his Halloween rounds.

Tharp and his wife, Tia, ordered their Reverse Trick-or-Treating supplies through Global Exchange (the kits are free each year while supplies last) because they wanted to help raise awareness of the Fair Trade issues in the cocoa industry, which he says most people don't know even know exist.

"For us, as Christians, it is an issue of justice," Tharp said. "We believe that God is just, and we believe in bringing justice to people everywhere."

The justice he speaks of can be found in efforts such as those of Interpol, the international police organization which announced in August that it identified and rescued 54 children from slavery in cocoa fields in Cote d'Ivoire, also known as Ivory Coast, in Africa. The children - some as young as 11 - were laboring 12 hours a day in hazardous conditions and not being paid for their work, according to information From Global Exchange.

Other recent efforts to improve practices in the cocoa industry include the Cadbury company achieving Fair Trade certification in 2009 for its Dairy Milk chocolate bars in the United Kingdom, with planned certification in additional countries. Cadbury is the first major chocolate brand to achieve the certification, according to Adrienne Fitch-Frankel, director of Global Exchange's Fair Trade campaign.

"This is a HUGE victory," Fitch-Frankel said.

And it's not just about social justice. Fair Trade standards also help protect the environment, playing a key role in protecting the Earth from global climate change, she said.

Shared goals

Reverse Trick-or-Treating also fits into the Catholic social teaching tradition at St. Mary by the Lake Catholic Church, where Lynn Urban is incorporating the program into the church's Feast of All Saints celebration on Nov. 1. As part of that celebration, Urban creates "Saint Sacks" for her Christian Foundations students each year which are filled with candy and information about different saints. This year she will add the Reverse-Trick-or-Treating information and chocolate to the sacks to help spread the word.

Urban, who is director of religious education at St. Mary by the Lake, said her hope is that the students will share the information with their parents, making the program an intergenerational one.

"The global connections aspect of Reverse Trick-or-Treating fits well with our Catholic social teaching," she said.

Other local congregations whose members are participating in the program include First Presbyterian Church, Olympia Brown Unitarian Universalist Church, Holy Communion Lutheran Church, St. Andrew Lutheran Church and First United Methodist Church.

Together they are helping raise awareness not only of unfair practices within the cocoa industry, but of Fair Trade and global poverty in general.

"Fair trade is a direct solution to addressing the issue of global poverty, but it only works if people know about it and understand what a powerful tool it can be," said Sister Ann Pratt, director of the HOPES Center, which is coordinating some of the Reverse Trick-or-Treating efforts in Racine. Reverse Trick-or-Treating is an easy way to involve our community in conversations about Fair Trade, she said. By giving out a Reverse Trick-or-Treat kit, people not only spend time learning about Fair Trade, but invite others into the conversation by sharing what they have learned.

"This project was one way of helping us think about what is happening to children globally and giving us a way to act locally," Sister Pratt said. "Hopefully, it will help all of us stop and think and make decisions to purchase chocolate products that we know are Fair Trade."