In India, Kailash Satyrathi first established RugMark in 1994, and Nina Smith, a Skoll Award winner, launched its program five years later in the United States. The RugMark Foundation, a global fair trade nonprofit, is dedicated to eliminating child labor in South Asia’s handmade rug industry. RugMark has leveraged its fair trade advocacy campaigns to influence consumers and carpet retailers in the world’s biggest market to purchase and sell only those carpets that have been properly certified as child labor-free.



A percentage of the sale price of certified rugs helps RugMark rescue and rehabilitate children they find in the factories, as well as daycare, literacy, formal schooling and vocational training for children who might otherwise be coerced into labor. Nina and Kailash project that with just 15% of the U.S. market share for rugs, RugMark could achieve its goal and stop child labor in the South Asian rug industry by 2020.

Demand for child labor is so high in the countries where RugMark operates that desperate parents often sell their children into bondage, including child trafficking, commercial sexual exploitation, and domestic work. An estimated 14% of children in India between the ages of fie and fourteen are engaged in child labor activities. Rugs are among South Asia’s top export products and a high employment sector from the poor. Child workers come cheaply and sometimes at no cost, driving down wages for adult laborers.

RugMark rugs are made on looms and in factories that are inspected independently for child labor. The rugs are certified with the RugMark TM label, each with an individual number that can be traced though the supply chain back to the loom.

RugMark’s strategy is replicable as a systemic approach to ending child labor. Kailash and Nina began by raising consumer awareness, and thus demand, for ethically made rugs. Inspectors, teachers, labor rights experts, loom owners, exporters, importers designers, and retailers work together to ensure that no child works on a RugMark rug. Connecting designers to manufacturers is an important step in the cross-continental business. To maintain the upkeep of the manufacturers’ practices, RugMark inspectors make surprise visits to loom and spinning factories, monitoring an average of 64 looms a day, or more than 16,000 a year. If a child is found on a loom or in a factory, he or she is taken to a RugMark rehabilitation center and placed in school. More than 3,000 children attend school with RugMark support. RugMark’s work is having a profound effect. Its certified rugs now represent 2% of the U.S. market. Roughly 30% of imports from Nepal carry the RugMark certification, already demonstrating major transformations within the industry in South Asia.

photos courtesy of Romano, Sam Kittner, and thanks to RugMark

The hiatus in our blog is a halftime in the series, poised between characterizations of our writing process and after the launch that released Tactics of Hope to an audience worldwide. This pause in correspondence, for which I hope you accept our apologies, has been for good cause: 6 weeks of local and on-the-road speaking engagements for a book tour.

As you can see from TacticsofHope.org, our book talks have taken us from San Francisco to Berkeley, Los Angeles, New York, Washington DC, Silicon Valley, and Seattle, among others. On a shoestring budget self-funded, I flew home from the East Coast while Wilford continued on to speak at Boston, New Haven, Camden (Maine), and other places in New England.

Together from late May upon release of the book to the public, and late June when we parted ways and Wilford kept on traveling with his incredible wife, Carole (who is a beautiful and accomplished social entrepreneur in her own right), we conducted nearly 8 "book talks". With social entrepreneurs featured in the book including Priya Haji (World of Good) at the World Affairs Council in San Francisco, Book Passage Marin, and Mrs. Dalloway's independent bookstore in Berkeley, Van Jones (Ella Baker Center and Green for All) at the Books Inc. in the SF Civic Center, Matt Flannery (Kiva) at Virgin Megastore, Sasha Chanoff (Mapendo) at East West Books in Manhattan, and Nina Smith (Rugmark) at the Meridian International Center in Washington DC, we have had some fantastic opportunities so far.

This has been an incredibly steep learning curve for me, personally, though, as public speaking with Wilford and social entrepreneurs is a deeply humbling experience.

Meanwhile, due to the limited budget and resources I have had to work with, our marketing and PR of the book has entered me into a whole new set of challenges with respect to "getting the word out there". If any of you readers know a bit about marketing a book, we sure could use your help!

I am now traveling in South East Asia, writing this during my transit layover in Tokyo, about to spend 7 weeks actively looking for social entrepreneurs throughout China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand.

Talk to you all soon, I hope. And since there have been few comments, throw a line out there and let's begin to engage. Until next week!!!