DATE: 2/23/12 To: Professor Tweed
From: Abigail Ruiz
WST 4415 Service Learning Proposal.
Mission Statement: To engage in local-to-global activism by supporting sustainable relationship-building alongside members of the farm working community, the Youth and Young Adult Network of the National Farm Worker Ministry (YAYA), and La Via Campesina. Through communication and cooperation we will strive to work with our community partners towards the shared aim of agricultural justice. Furthermore, we intend to make connections from the local farm worker community to the global food sustainability movement.
Organizational Structure:
•Task-based committees:
•Hold members accountable to completion of assigned tasks
•Maintain effective communication with group members and community partners
•Committee Chairperson: liaison for committee
•Meeting facilitator
•Ensure meetings run smoothly and in a timely matter
•Hold meetings with Committee Chairpersons
•Co-liaisons:
•Communicate with community partners
•Attend YAYA meetings
•Secretary
•Record keeping
•Attendance
•Ethics Committee
•Ensure mindful enacting of project
•Oversee three strike policy
•Failure to complete task or attend a designated event results in one strike
•First and second strikes result in voting restrictions
•Three strikes result in a meeting with the Ethics Committee and Professor Tweed to discuss the member’s role and future participation in the project
By learning about the issues faced by farm workers as systemically correlated with the adverse effects of globalization, we are learning from the Network of Maquila Workers Rights in Central America discussed by Nancy A. Naples, as Maquila workers also face oppression in the workforce based on oppressive neoliberal policies (273). In this vein, our group is democratically structured and focuses on working with, rather than for our community partner. In the spirit of feminist NGOs that have come before us, we endeavor to work as professionals within a committed network of organizers, activists, students and farm workers to prioritize an ethic of communal involvement and relationship building across national borders and global landscapes. We have chosen a model that stresses personal accountability, which is imperative to success in any cooperative situation, and we are organizing by committees with leadership positions to stress personal strengths, but avoid stringent hierarchy.
Our group’s effectiveness shall be accessed through measures of active participation, thoughtful communication, and shared aims of members, which work together to create group cohesion. We will assess the effectiveness of our project by working in solidarity with our community partners as well as attempting to examine our assumptions, by involving the Fellsmere farm worker community in our debriefing and work assessment meeting.
Community Partner/Global Theme:
We attempt to address the larger systemic issues of the treatment and unfair conditions of farm workers, by focusing on women farm workers and the issues they face. We know that “women produce 70% of the food on earth but they are marginalized and oppressed by neoliberalism and patriarchy” (What Is 1). These systems of oppression often deny farm workers and food producer’s access to the food they produce. Farm workers usually live in communities that are isolated as a result of environmental racism, which limits their access to affordable food and produce.
Farmers benefit from the isolation farm workers face by becoming the sole merchant of the food they consume, pricing food at higher value than the farm worker can afford with their sub poverty wages, thus maintaining these individuals within a cycle of oppression. One possible way of addressing this issue is to “produce food for local consumption” (Desai 24). By the FWAF organizing a community garden, they create access within their own community to organic produce, thereby empowering the community through their labor and leadership building especially within the women who help sustain the garden. By creating a community garden and facilitating plans of an animal farm, the farm workers of Fellsmere are establishing a self-sustainable community that benefits people within the community and develops closer relationships where they share and trade the fruits of their labor.
Farm worker communities face isolation, marginalization and significant underrepresentation within our community, which this service-learning project aims to address by bridging these two communities in order to build relationships between Fellsmere and the UCF students. Our class is taking steps toward working in solidarity with FWAF by organizing a garden tool fundraiser that they requested our class to facilitate in the UCF area. These tools will be utilized by the FWAF to sustain their community garden project. We may engage our global partner, La Via Campesina, in the fundraisers with our local community partner. Throughout this project, weekly email with La Via Campesina will establish a relationship based on open communication regarding the organization’s needs.
I feel that this project addresses several of the goals and objectives of the course. For example, it involves a marginalized community that is usually made invisible in our society despite their massive contributions to essential components of our every day lives (what we eat and how this food gets to us). Secondly it helps us see the ways groups and even feminist organizations usually enact ‘volunteer’ work and the problematic assumptions and implications that are a result of them. Like Minh-ha writes “The perception of the outsider as the one who needs help has taken on he successive forms of the barbarian, the pagan, the infidel, the wild man, the “native’ and the underdeveloped” (Minh-ha 54). We see how service based in charity ‘others’ and positions marginalized groups as sole benefactors of our good graces. I believe that through actual human interaction and community building we will see the community as human and not as a subject to be discussed amongst ourselves. Hopefully through this project will we learn to analyze and unpack our assumptions more critically and examine how our western perspective of the world might’s skew how we treat and interact with ‘different’ communities.
Project Proposal:
Through working together actively and effectively as a group, we plan to carry out this service-learning project by breaking up into task-based committees that address specific facets of our project in a focused manner. While initial jobs are divvied out based on personal interest and skill, we seek to learn collaboratively with and from each other through engaging roles and tasks which may be new to us and supporting each other through the process, but critically assess our interactions in order not to tokenize experiences and knowledge from class members of color. We are using our privilege and access of communication tools such as social media and email to make decisions and share feedback. To create longevity of our project’s objectives, we will focus on educating ourselves about our community partners and the local-to-global issues our project encompasses. We will foster sustainable relationship building by educating ourselves first – by participating in human interactions and talking directly with the community members as we work together by intentionally participating in conversations that include the voices and experiences of the farm workers in Fellsmere, and sharing of knowledge. We will develop a sustainable relationship with the shared goal and efforts of sustaining the community garden.
Building on our community partner YAYA’s existing relationship with the Fellsmere farm worker community, we intend to learn the most effective way of utilizing our local resources, privilege and access, in order to maximize our outreach to other organizations and within the UCF community.
Project Timeline:
1.February 22: Initial contact with Lariza Garzon of YAYA to confirm partnership
2.February 24: Contact Global Partner
3.March 1: In-class presentation by YAYA
1.The historical events that have led to the current oppressive conditions of the agricultural industry
2.Solidarity (sustainable relationship), privilege, power dynamics, etc.
3.March 10: Fundraising Event
4.March 17: Fundraising Event
5.March 31: Participate in YAYA’s Community Garden Project:
1.8 am Depart Orlando from NFWM office
2.10 am Arrive To Fellsmere
3.10:15 am Welcome, introductions and instructions
4.10:45 am Gardening begins!
5.1:00 pm Lunch (vegetarian options available)/ short soccer game
6. 2:00 pm Back to gardening!
7.4:30 pm Debrief
8.5:15 pm Dinner
9.6:00 pm Depart Fellsmere
10.8:00 pm Arrive to Orlando at NFWM Office
11.Date TBD: Debriefing meeting
Works Cited
Desai, Manisha. "Transnational Solidarity: Women's Agency, Structural Adjustment, and Globalization." Women's Activism and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles and Transnational Politics. By Nancy A. Naples and Manisha Desai. New York: Routledge, 2002. 15-33. Print.
Naples, Nancy A. "The Challenges and Possibilities of Transnational Feminist Praxis."
Minh-ha, Trinh T. “Women Native Other.” Indiana: Indianapolis, 1989. 47-65. Print
Women's Activism and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles and Transnational Politics. By Nancy A. Naples and Manisha Desai. New York: Routledge, 2002. 267-81. Print.
“Two Years After the Events…” La Via Campesina: International Peasant’s Movement. La Via Campesina International Peasant’s Voice. 12 January 2012. Web. 23 February 2012.
“What is La Via Campesina?” La Via Campesina: International Peasant’s Movement. La Via Campesina International Peasant’s Voice. 9 February 2011. Web. 23 February 2012.
