Saved By the Bellwether

Some school fundraisers start hawking greener products

Posted at 8:39 AM on 15 Jul 2008

Some school and nonprofit fundraisers recently have turned to greener options to generate needed cash. Instead of sending youngsters out into the community to hawk items of questionable greenness like candy, magazines, and virgin-forest wrapping paper, some schools have instead turned to greener wares such as fair-trade coffee, metal water bottles, hand-made soaps, and recycled-content wrapping paper. The trend is not just about having kids sell items their parents might actually want to buy (though that's part of it), it's also aimed at avoiding contradictory messages to impressionable minds. "We're telling the kids about obesity and selling cookie dough," said Lisa Olson, founder of Greenraising, a greener-products fundraising company. "We're telling them about global warming, and they come home with this big catalog of wrapping paper with no recycled content."

source:  The Wall Street Journal (access ain't free)