This Thanksgiving, you can help sustain the groundbreaking advances we’ve achieved through the Fair Food Program, and give thanks for the women and men who put food on your Thanksgiving table, by becoming a Fair Food Sustainer

The holiday season is officially upon us.  The routine of daily life is receding by the hour, replaced by the gathering joy of family and friends coming together after months, or even years, apart; by all the details of preparation for the big day ahead, from food and drink to accommodations for one and all; and – if we’re being honest! – by all the more mundane things that have come to define the holidays these days, from crucial football games to the very best gift deals.

And so today we, too, are taking a break from our usual wall-to-wall coverage of the vibrant Campaign for Fair Food for a Thanksgiving message from Immokalee.  Indeed, today we’d like to take a moment to discuss the urgent need to sustain the groundbreaking progress we have won – workers and consumers, together – through the Fair Food Program, progress for the countless women and men who work throughout the year to put food on our tables, this week and every week.

So this year, as we give thanks for all the many blessings in our own lives, let us also give thanks for the farmworkers in America’s fields.  And the most concrete, immediate way you can show your support right now is by investing in the very best program for the protection of farmworkers’ fundamental human rights, the Fair Food Program. 

This Thanksgiving, give thanks for human rights in the fields by becoming a Fair Food Sustainer! 

As a Sustainer, your monthly donation goes toward the daily expenses of providing and expanding human rights protection across the Fair Food Program’s vast and growing landscape: printing education booklets for tens of thousands of workers from Florida to New Jersey, paying human rights monitors’ salaries, supporting the next big Wendy’s Boycott action in the Campaign for Fair Food, and much more.  But on top of that, your support also enables Fair Food Program representatives to travel across the country to train and advise worker organizations in other crops and other industries hungry for change; to work with new growers to implement the Program in their operations; and to collaborate with participating buyers to expand the Fair Food Program’s footprint in their supply chains. 

With your support, we know we can usher in a new era in which the dignity of all workers is respected.  Today, the Fair Food Program is firmly rooted in seven states and several crops, where farmworkers now work, in their own words, “a gusto” in the fields.  Moreover, the Program has become a beacon of hope projecting its promise of change to millions of more workers across the U.S. and around the world.  Just this past year, the Milk with Dignity Program – built by workers with Vermont’s Migrant Justice organization, painstakingly employing the Fair Food blueprint – was implemented on over 70 dairy farms, with education sessions, farm audits, and a 24-hour complaint line.

And that’s just one example of the exponential growth, and promise, of the model established by the Fair Food Program.  As we write, seeds are being planted in many more industries, both here in the US and around the world.

The power and growth of the Fair Food movement has long depended on the relationships it builds: the relationships between farmworker families in Immokalee and consumer families from coast to coast, families fundamentally connected by the issue of food.  And we have found, time and time again, that when we work in concert, when we build a common cause between farmworkers and consumers, we can create extraordinary change in our food system.  Together, we have marched and fasted and made our voices heard, demanding farm labor justice.  We have braved cold, rain, wind, and heat, often with our families in tow, all in the name of a more modern, more human agricultural industry. 

And through that painstaking effort, we have won fundamental rights for tens of thousands of farmworkers across the U.S.  But we are far from finished.  As we expand to new states, new crops, and even new industries, farmworkers need you and your family to keep standing with them by joining the Fair Food Sustainer Program.

This year, give thanks the farmworkers who are today harvesting the food that will fill your family’s table on Thanksgiving Day.  Be a part of the growing chorus of hope whose voices are reaching millions of more hard-working men and women around the world.  Become a Fair Food Sustainer.