The UnTours Foundation invests in microlending in the Global South, where not all microlending is created equal. Many projects supported by microlending help individuals along the unsustainable and destructive path of Western development assisting in the purchase of dangerous pesticides, GMO seeds, cars, and the like. Instead, we look for projects that offer the Global…
And what better day to visit Media than this October 21st when Fair Trade Live 2012 will be gracing the streets of “downtown” Media with dozens of musicians and dancers. Find unique clothing, jewelry, and other items at the Fair Fair. The UnTours Foundation helped organize Fair Trade Live 2008 when over 5,000 people showed…
I met Carol Metzker through the generous Trust Committee of her Quaker Meeting, Willistown Friends Meeting, which recently granted funds to our Fair Trade committee for educational materials. Carol is a writer, frequent speaker and coauthor of the book, Appreciative Intelligence: Seeing the Mighty Oak in the Acorn. An encounter with an 11-year-old girl rescued…
Norma Lee Black met a young Hal Taussig at the First Baptist Church in Amarillo, Texas, when she was 22. They married and have taken decades of adventures together from ranching in Colorado to working at UnTours. In 1993, Norma and Hal founded the UnTours Foundation as a way to channel UnTours profits to those…
Foundation board member and theater enthusiast, Tom Hibberd, took some of us out last night to see Bruce Graham’s most recent play, “The Outgoing Tide”. With unexpected humor, the play spotlights a family dealing with Alzheimer’s. The experience reminded me of the following beautiful and haunting poem by Harry LeFever, who wrote about the…
Stanley T. “Tom” Hibberd, III, and his then future wife, Wendy, were students of Hal’s in 1Elizabethkillough3 at Springfield High School in Pennsylvania. It was this relationship with Hal along with the foundation’s work to make Media, PA, a Fair Trade town, that drew Tom to the foundation board. What Tom likes most about the…
Andy Paminger got to know Hal and Norma Taussig in 2010 when he began working as the Marketing Director at UnTours. Personal circumstances pulled him back to Boston in 2011, but when asked to join the UnTours Foundation board – and take on a long board meeting commute! – he graciously said Yes! It was…
Here’s Hal in 2010 with Bart Houlahan and Jay Gilbert of B Lab, which certifies B Corporations. This photo captures Hal just after winning the first annual B Lab “Hal Taussig Award”. One of our aims at the UnTours Foundation is to invest in businesses with great values, that give back, and that don’t “take”…
All of our foundation board members are amazing, of course, and that includes Mary LeFever, who first met Hal and Norma when her husband, Harry, taught with Hal at Springfield High School in southeastern Pennsylvania. When Hal and Norma formed the UnTours Foundation in 1993, they asked Mary to be a founding board member. Mary…
Here’s Hal with his younger brother, Warren, father of UnTours’ General Manager Brian Taussig-Lux. Hal grew up in an evangelical Christian family that believed in “the Rapture.” He tried hard to share his family’s beliefs, but couldn’t. When he was about 13 years old and found himself alone milking the cows, he thought the Rapture…