Hey friends,

We wanted to share our latest blog post (below) from Nashville Fair Food about our fundraiser for getting to Florida to support the tour, as well as our plans for the tour action in Nashville!  We raised $600+ a week ago at our event with Oscar from CIW, thanks to the 70 faith folks, community members, and students that attended — so we’ll be sending two 15-passenger vans to Florida!

 

Each member of our dozen-strong local coordinating committee is working on outreach to friends, family, and their community groups across the city every week until the tour arrives.  Each member of our coordinating committee represents a faith, student, or community group and so many hands will make light work…we hope!

 

On the Wendy’s front, we’re also having two op-eds to appear in student newspapers at universities with Wendy’s very close to campus as part of this week’s focus on Wendy’s for Student/Farmworker Alliance’s “Boot the Braids” campaign.

 

Wishing everyone the best — so much energy over the next month! And if you want to come to Nashville for the tour on March 11, you’re more than welcome to come — otherwise, we’ll see you in Lakeland (and maybe Columbus, too)!

 

– Ben W., for the Nashville Fair Food Coordinating Committee

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Oscar Otzoy of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (pictured in our blog post) joined us in Nashville last week for an exciting evening of discussion about the Fair Food Program and what is coming next in the campaign for Fair Food.

 

As we learned, the Fair Food Program has created, for the first time ever in the agricultural industry in the United States, worker-to-worker education sessions about rights in the fields.  In these sessions, led by the CIW in the presence of growers’ representatives as well as the direct supervisors of farmworkers, workers learn of their rights, including the right to be free from forced labor, the right to be free from sexual harassment, and the right to report abuses to the Fair Food Standards Council, the CIW, or to the grower.

 

In order to enforce these standards for human rights – such as ending forced labor, physical violence, and sexual harassment in the fields – we must, as consumers, call on all buyers to come on board with the program and ensure that there is no longer an unfair market for tomatoes.

 

Ending a history of sub-poverty wages also requires every buyer to contribute their penny-per-pound toward increasing farmworkers’ pay.  So Publix and Wendy’s – the time is now to do your part and join your competitors in the Fair Food Program!

 

In fact, more and more of Nashville is learning about Fair Food – so much so, that we think that the next step is for us to bring 500 of our closest friends and family together and march on Publix right here in Nashville!

 

The CIW is going on tour to 10 cities to tell Publix that “The Time Is Now” to join Fair Food (read more below) and we want to welcome them to Nashville with true Southern hospitality.

 

We’re working out the last-minute details as you read this email… Mark your calendars for March 11 – more details are coming soon!

 

P.S. If you want to join Nashville Fair Food in Florida for the tour’s culmination at Publix headquarters on March 15, share our online fundraiser to pay for our bus with your family and friends and then send us an email!