October will be over in a couple of days, and we’ve only realized today that it’s been Fair Trade Coffee Month all along. We’d been shamefully and guiltily scooping from the remains of a roommate’s Bustelo sack for the past week, when we came across a listing for a dance party full of responsible, triple-bottom-line conscious people on Monday night at North Star Bar: The Independents Coffee Cooperative‘s Fair Trade Dance Party. The Cooperative, founded in 2003, is basically a group of independent coffee shops that realized if they wanted to survive the Philadelphia-region onslaught of the Starbucks juggernaut, they’d have to supply the local coffee-drinking population with not only quality, but consumer satisfaction: Knowing that your money is supporting a decent company. Joe Coffee, Green Line, Kaffa Crossing, Metropolitan, and Mugshots are the Philly members that have teamed up through Equal Exchange to a small farmer-owned coffee farm, Cooperativa San Fernando in Cusco, Peru. The listed coffeehouses sell Independents Peruvian Select coffee from San Fernando, and when you buy it, you support better working conditions for the farmers, and your local coffee shop. Bear in mind, though, that your local coffee shop isn’t the only place to get fair trade coffee; all Dunkin Donuts espresso is fair trade, and you can even get fair trade coffee at Wal*Mart. But when have you ever seen someone sipping espresso at the pickup bar of a DnD? And when have you ever wanted to pull out your laptop at one?