Reflective Images Jewelry is donating 20% of any purchase at their store or on their website, ReflectiveJewelry.com, to any friend of the Market and Institute. All donations from your purchase are earmarked for programs that directly benefit the vendors at the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market.
By aligning our economic choices with our heartfelt values, we can create a more beautiful future for all of us. Organic red chili, tomatoes, beautiful jewelry, and empowerment for farmers and other producer communities around the world!
If you buy at the shop, mention the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market Institute. If purchasing on-line, type in SFFMI in the shopping cart.
You are invited!
Reflective Images will be hosting a special reception to kick-off the amazing sale benefit! Come learn more about the Institute’s work and Reflective Images’ mission and vision, and start your holiday shopping! And, for this day only, 25% of your purchase will be donated in support of vendor programs! After this event, 20% of your purchases will be donated to the Institute.
Friday, November 11 from 5-7pm
912 Baca Street
Santa Fe, NM 87505
We look forward to seeing you!
About Reflective Images
Fair Trade Jewelry For Farming
Back in 1995, Marc Choyt and Helen Chantler purchased a piece of farmland in Mora County with a few friends. Our dream was to build a small community and grow some of our own food. The same year we also started our company, Reflective Images Jewelry. Our business would fund our land improvements.
The river through our property had ten-foot deep cuts on both sides of the watercourse. Cattle had consumed the vegetation beyond the ecosystem’s capacity to regenerate. A few miles outside our valley, the river pathetically dried out. Inspired by the work of Allan Savory’s Holistic Management Program we got a grant from Soil and Water Conservation, did a full riparian restoration and created a rotational grazing system.
There was just one problem that seemed insurmountable. The sourcing of our jewelry was destroying a river in Africa to restore our river in Northern New Mexico.
Sourcing Of Jewelry
The jewelry sector is a commodity-based business, just like oil or lumber or commercial agriculture. A wedding ring symbolizes love, union, and community, but the gold that produced it destroyed habitats and toxified watersheds with mercury.
Those who shop the Farmers’ Market want to know the farmers who grow the tomato and green chile. Shouldn’t we also want to know about the miners where we get our gold and gems?
Over the course of our twenty years in business, we have worked to align our sourcing with the symbolism of what we create with our own hands in our Baca St. studio.
About ten years ago we started using only recycled metals. But alas, recognizing that gold will continue to be mined regardless, we became the first and currently only Fair Trade gold jeweler in the USA.
Fairtrade works with small-scale miners. Currently, about fifteen million small-scale gold miners live in poverty and exploitation. Through Fairtrade, miners, many of whom are also often part time farmers, are empowered through fair wages and social premiums.
We are Fairtrade’s commercial liaison for gold in the US, the largest jewelry market in the world. Our position is similar to being the only Fair Trade coffee company thirty years ago. Once the larger market catches on, what we have started in our small shop will one day empower small mining communities worldwide.
Acting Locally And Globally
We are beginning to achieve our dream, but not as we imagined when we started out in 1995.
The riparian area we restored now has beaver and nesting waterfowl. Though we sold that land, our home off Agua Fria has chickens and turkeys, a green house, garden, and seven fruit trees and a roof water catchment system.
Helen Chantler, Marc’s wife, CEO and the lead jewelry designer for Reflective Images, grew up working on her uncle’s dairy farm. She now serves as Treasurer on the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market Board, applying her many years of business experience for the benefit of our agricultural community.