Farmworker Coalition
The California Farmworker Coalition (CFC) was formed in Spring 2020 as the Farmworker Advocacy Working Group, when the disproportionate impacts of the pandemic on Latinx and Indigenous farmworker communities drew attention from media and policymakers, while farmworkers and community based organizations (CBOs) closest to them remained left out of policy conversations in California’s state capitol.
A small group of CBOs and allies began meeting to respond to the growing number of policies referencing or aiming to serve farmworkers, to demand recognition of farmworkers’ essential role, and to ensure that farmworker-serving organizations have a seat at the table where state policy impacting their communities are being decided.
Since 2020, the California Farmworker Coalition has continued to grow to include CBOs working in the Central Valley, Central Coast, and North Bay. In late 2020, the CFC became the policy advocacy arm of the COVID-19 Farmworker Study (COFS), a collaborative research project providing critical missing information on farmworkers’ abilities to protect themselves and their families during the COVID-19 pandemic, gathered directly from farmworkers.
The CFC represents organizations that are committed to centering the needs of California’s farmworkers in state policy, including labor, environmental justice, and Indigenous farmworker community-based organizations, advocates and researchers. The CFC receives backbones support from the California Food and Farming Network, which is building a movement centered on racial equity to transform the food and farming system through state policies and is co-facilitated by the Central California Environmental Justice Network.
While the group includes allied organizations, decision making is centered around community based or power-building organizations whose farmworker comités inform organizational priorities and strategies and make up the voting membership of the CFC. This unique composition of frontline organizations connected to workers with lived experience and expertise of agricultural work and allied groups with research, advocacy and facilitation expertise ensures that the group’s collective action and resources are grounded in the true needs of farmworker communities. Non-voting members support by contributing policy insights, strategy, resources, and solidarity to the collective actions determined by voting members.
We believe that statewide policy advocacy is most effective when directly accountable to and driven by local organizing. Power for marginalized workers like farmworkers has always come from strong grassroots organizing. Yet many of the policies with the greatest impact on workers, from wage and hour laws to health and safety standards, are primarily being set at the state level, where local farmworker organizing groups need a voice. This is why the CFC focuses on state policy primarily, while committed to following the lead and needs of farmworker organizing.
While the California Farmworker Coalition has seen its influence and reach in Sacramento increase as it meets with more legislators and impacts more policies, the coalition has shifted from responding defensively to policies developed in closed rooms that fall short of the true changes workers deserve, to proactively developing solutions to the most pressing issues impacting California’s farmworkers.
The California Farmworker Coalition has active campaigns focused on health and safety enforcement for agricultural workers and is actively fundraising to support staff capacity at voting member organizations, provide expanded capacity building to farmworker advocates, and expand its Sacramento presence. To learn more, contact CFC co-facilitator,
Beth Spitler.
VOTING MEMBERS
NON - VOTING MEMBERS
- California Food and Farming Network
- California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation
- Lideres Campesinas
- Pesticide Action Network
- United Food and Commercial Workers – Western States Council
- Western Center on Ag Health and Safety