[hupso_hide][hupso title=”Help ensure dignity & respect for #farmworker women!” url=”https://ciw-online.org/”]

Catapult launches new crowdfunding project to support expansion of the Fair Food Program…

Earlier this year, the Fair Food Program won the support of Catapult, a pioneering crowdfunding platform that works with groups around the globe to advance the rights of women and girls.  And today, we have the great pleasure of announcing the launch of the Catapult online campaign, “Ensure dignity and respect for farmworkers” — an effort to raise $25,000 in 150 days to help pay for a new auditor for the Fair Food Standards Council (FFSC), the Fair Food Program’s indispensable third-party monitoring body.  Now you can help support the FFSC’s crucial, day-to-day human rights work in the fields by checking out the online fundraising campaign here.

The FFSC’s auditors are the women and men who do the necessary, behind-the-scenes work of conducting audits in the fields of participating growers, fielding and resolving complaints, and monitoring the passage of the Penny per Pound premium as it moves from buyers to growers, and from growers to workers.  These much-needed funds will fuel not only the Program’s current operations, but also the expansion of workers’ rights under the Program beyond Florida’s fields. 

Here’s a little bit more about the newest supporter of the Fair Food Program:

We all believe in a gender equal world.

But more than 500 million girls and women will be denied the opportunity to take part in the next generation’s development.

This doesn’t have to be the reality.

Organizations working for girls and women currently raise less than half the average amount raised by other nonprofits and charities.

Catapult can change that.

We’re combining the financial power and actions of people like you to help tackle gender inequality around the world.

In the United States, there are few people so vulnerable as farmworker women, who have faced the “daily bread” of sexual harassment and violence, verbal abuse, and grinding poverty for generations.  And there is no program as effective at eliminating those abuses as the Fair Food Program.  In the words of PBS Frontline Producer Andres Cediel:

”… women are therefore educated about their rights through the [Fair Food] Program. We see auditors going out to the fields and talking to women about their experiences and creating much more awareness and also empowering people to come forward…

… What we’ve seen in other parts of the country is that sexual harassment policies are being put into place, such as in California there are sexual harassment trainings going on with supervisors. The difference is not seeing it get to the field worker level as directly as what we’ve seen in Immokalee. So it’s really, after going around the country, some of the most proactive policies that we’ve seen have been coming out of Florida.”

To help secure these unprecedented reforms in Florida’s tomato fields — and to expand the Fair Food Program to new states and new crops — the FFSC needs the resources to make it happen.  Please take a moment to check out the project, “Ensure Respect and Dignity for Farmworker Women” and share it with your friends!