Visionary leadership – the vision to see a better, brighter future and the ability to communicate that vision in a way that moves others to join you in making it real – is a rare quality these days.  The worst seek to strip us of our hard-fought rights and lead us back to a time of greater oppression and inequality, while the best are so consumed with the battle to defend the advances of the past century that they have no time or energy to imagine a better world. With few exceptions, real, tangible leadership toward a vision of ever-more equal rights seems like a thing of the past.

If you are reading this message, however, you know of at least one remarkable exception to that tragic tableau, and you are an essential part of it: the Fair Food Program.

Today, 18 years after Lucas’ visionary words at Yum! Brands headquarters in Louisville, 13 additional participating buyers have joined Taco Bell in signing legally binding Fair Food Agreements with the CIW, including many of the largest buyers of produce in the world, from McDonald’s to Walmart. And together we – the CIW and the Fair Food Nation – have harnessed that awesome market power to enforce rights that have never been enforced before in this country’s fields, and to write new rights into existence that have made tens of thousands of farmworkers’ lives better, fairer, and more humane.

In other words, thanks to the leadership of farmworkers from Immokalee and allies like you from Florida to California, Consciousness plus Commitment has, indeed, equaled Change. We have transformed the tomato fields of Florida, once dubbed “ground zero for modern-day slavery,” into the “best working environment in American agriculture,” and we have exported that human rights revolution to new states, new crops, new industries, new countries and new continents around the globe… all from a vision born in Immokalee’s dusty streets and nurtured in Florida’s fertile fields.

As we celebrate the unparalleled success of the Fair Food Program, we continue to campaign for more corporations to sign on as buyers so that we can continue to expand the Program’s reach to more and more workers. The Campaign for Fair Food continues with a focus on Kroger, Publix, and Wendy’s, massive retail food brands that cling desperately to a past where forced labor, sexual harassment and assault, and dangerous and deadly working conditions remained hidden in the dark corners of the food industry’s supply chain and never cast a dark cloud over their shareholder meetings and corporate boardrooms. And so they refuse to sign – despite ample proof that the Fair Food Program is the only proven solution to eradicate forced labor and other serious abuses in agriculture. The Campaign for Fair Food is a gargantuan, David-versus-multiple-Goliaths effort, requiring massive multi-day marches, rallies, fasts, and nationwide bus tours. Each action requires art, buses, food, water, medical supplies, legal oversight, volunteers, and permits, among other things. A major action can cost tens of thousands of dollars. But as the success of our previous campaigns shows, every penny spent in mobilizing behind our shared vision of a more modern, more humane food industry is worth it.

When a new Participating Buyer joins the Fair Food Program, they bring their supply chain with them – meaning thousands of additional farmworkers can be covered by the Program’s groundbreaking protections. Your donation today makes that urgently-needed progress possible.

In 2005, even as we celebrated our hard-fought victory in the boycott of Taco Bell, Lucas laid out a vision that challenged all of us to continue to fight until all farmworkers “enjoy equal rights, the same rights all other workers in this country are guaranteed.” As 2023 comes to a close, even as we celebrate the unprecedented success of the Fair Food Program, we still cannot afford to rest on our laurels. Help us make Lucas’s dream real for more and more farmworkers, on more and more fields, from Florida to California, with your continued support for the CIW and the Fair Food Program.