Dear friend,
When the coronavirus pandemic first began to take root across the country, we knew we needed to act fast. The highly-contagious virus posed a grave threat to farmworker communities like Immokalee, where tens of thousands of essential workers, often living in cramped conditions and traveling to and from work in overcrowded vehicles, had no choice but to continue harvesting America’s produce – and no ability to socially distance or self-isolate – even while the rest of the country sheltered in place at home. The CIW would have to draw on every bit of its 30 years of experience to fight this nearly impossible battle.
And among the many weapons in its arsenal, from strategic communications to consumer mobilization, it has been the CIW’s unique approach to community-based education that has proven the most essential in the fight against the novel coronavirus.
As cases of COVID-19 continue to rise not only in Immokalee, but in farmworker communities across Florida, your monthly donation can fuel the CIW’s critical public health education efforts and help save lives.
Click here to become a Fair Food Sustainer.
Drawing on decades of education experience in the community of Immokalee and in the fields of the Fair Food Program, the CIW has produced trilingual drawings, posters, and flyers to sound the alarm about the pandemic and to convey best practices for farmworkers and growers alike to fight the deadly virus. And every day for the past three months, farmworkers have tuned into CIW’s Radio Conciencia while cooking dinner or on their way to work, hearing from public health officials and their own peers in radio theater skits about the growing threat.
Early in the pandemic, the CIW partnered with FFP partner Lipman Family Farms, the Immokalee Fire Department, and the Department of Health, to ensure that crucial handwashing stations were set up around town where farmworkers boarded buses for the long ride to and from the fields. CIW Women’s Group members and other community leaders banded together to sew hundreds of reusable fabric masks, supplementing thousands of more masks donated to the CIW by allies around the country, while the CIW Education Team spread out across Immokalee to distribute masks and other dearly-needed personal protective equipment to workers.
These preventative measures have saved lives, and they are more necessary now than ever before, as Immokalee becomes an increasingly dire hotspot in Southwest Florida.
