Human rights investigators and educators with the Fair Food Program in South Africa pose for a group photo with the South Africa edition of the FFP’s Know Your Rights and Responsibilities booklet, given to workers during education sessions.

Lupe Gonzalo, farmworker and CIW staff member: “Every country is different, but human rights must be implemented equally. We are all human beings, and wherever we are, we must be protected.”

Celeste Cloete-Carolus, FFP South Africa: “When I first became a part of the FFP almost a year ago, I was amazed at the way the Program is designed to restore dignity to workers…”

As the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Program ramps up its expansion across the United States — spreading its roots further by the day in the country where it was born — the award-winning program is also branching out into more and more countries around the globe. Thanks to the groundbreaking partnership among workers, growers, and buyers at the heart of the program, the FFP has been operating for the past two years in South Africa’s cut flower sector, with more farms across the country in multiple new crops set to join in the coming months! 

As the reach of the pioneering, worker-driven human rights program continues to grow, it is essential that the FFP remain firmly grounded in every new local context in which it operates. For an international expansion as ambitious as ours in South Africa, that means fostering a close working relationship with local human rights and worker organizations that have a deep understanding of the many cultures, languages, and longstanding political and economic dynamics that are interwoven to form the national fabric there. Those essential relationships allow us to learn from local human rights leaders and benefit from their insights, while at the same time sharing with them the lessons, methods, and protocols born of the FFP’s own rich history, as we come together to create a Fair Food Program every bit as rigorous and effective as the one born in Florida’s tomato fields 15 years ago, but tailored to the reality of South Africa’s fields and orchards today. 

This past week, the US and South Africa FFP teams met for a 4-day virtual training workshop and exchange to do just that. We’re excited to share with you a few reflections and photos from this remarkable international training experience!

One area of focus of the 4-day exchange was on what is known in the field of social change as “Popular Education”, an approach to education that employs drawings, theater, and video to capture a topic in a form that prompts — when led effectively — a participatory, group discussion on the impact of the issue on people’s lives, its root causes, and the ideas that might help solve the problem depicted in the prompt. It is a particularly effective education methodology in communities where people with multiple cultures and languages live side-by-side, communities like Immokalee and other migrant worker communities around the globe at the bottom of corporate supply chains.  

The CIW has used Popular Education for three decades in Immokalee and around the United States, starting well before the FFP was born, in early community meetings as workers came together and formed the CIW in the 1990s, and continuing after the program’s launch in 2010, in the crucial worker-to-worker education sessions held on each participating farm. Those sessions are critical to the FFP’s unique success, as they serve to inform workers of their rights under the program and how to defend their rights when they are violated, helping workers play their role in the FFP as the frontline monitors of their own rights. Indeed, for many workers on FFP farms, their first in-person experience with the program occurs when a team of CIW educators visits the farm for a worker-to-worker education session, like that pictured above. These education sessions, which are held on-the-farm and on-the-clock, have proven immensely helpful for workers over the last 15 years, and carrying the practice forward as the program expands overseas is equally important to guaranteeing the worker-driven power of the model in its newest context.

An illustration created specifically for the FFP in South Africa, designed by local artists and farm labor rights experts with input from workers themselves. The illustration is intended to help inform workers of their right to protect themselves from heat stress — and to have clean water at work — without fear of retaliation. While this version is in English, the FFP South Africa team carries Xhosa, Afrikaans, Sesotho, and Setswana versions with them to each education session in order to work in the language each worker’s primary language, and the drawing is designed with the goal that its message be understood even without the words as literacy levels vary across crews as well.

Because many farmworkers’ initial contact with the Fair Food Program occurs in this discussion centered around a drawing, much of the recent training worksop focused on sharing this crucial education technology at the heart of the FFP’s success. First, in the weeks ahead of the workshop, the FFP teams from the US and South Africa collaborated to create a new education drawing about safe drinking water (above). Then, when it was finally time for the workshop itself to begin, the CIW education team spoke with their South African counterparts across the globe via Zoom in an animated discussion about their use of Popular Education and the best practices they’ve developed over the years, including tips on how to draw out the workers’ own experience with the issue through guided discussion, and how to always bring the conversation back from the lived experience in the fields to the rights in the FFP’s code of conduct. The team of educators in South Africa also had an opportunity to practice leading education sessions (below) to further hone the presentation for the South African context, with feedback from Immokalee.

Members of the FFP South Africa team practice leading a reflection in a worker-to-worker education session.

Coalition of Immokalee Workers
110 S 2nd St
Immokalee, FL 34142
United States

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