SL Proposal (Revised)

Date: 3/15/12 
To: Professor Tweed 
From: Patricia Parker 
Re: WST 4415 Service Learning Proposal

Mission Statement: To fight for agricultural justice and women’s rights in the farmworker community through fundraising and volunteering with YAYA and communication and cooperation with our forthcoming global partner.

Organizational Structure:

Secretary: maintains records (including attendance) and Google group

Scheduler: maintains calendar and plans event attendance.

Task-based committees (headed by a Committee Chairperson who acts as liaison for the committee and ensures meeting efficiency)

Task-based committees (headed by a Committee Chairperson who acts as liaison for the committee and ensures meeting efficiency)

Community partner liaisons (2): communicate with community partners and attend YAYA meetings

Global partner liaisons (2): work with fundraising committee

Ethics Committee (3): ensures mindful action, implements “three strike” policy

Three Strike Policy:

• Failure to complete a task or attend a designated event results in one strike

• First and second strikes result in voting restrictions

• Three strikes results in a meeting with the ethics committee and Professor Tweed Fundraising Organizers (4): responsible for coordinating an event and/or delegating responsibilities to other members to ensure that we are able to provide at least $190 (for food), 19 rakes and 19 shovels to the YAYA community garden project.

Members are accountable for their own attendance and participation. If a member is unable to attend an event, she or he must notify the scheduler. The Ethics Committee and “three strike” policy were conceived to deal with situations where a member fails to meet these standards. Democratically structured, our group focuses on working with our community. We have modeled our organizational strategy based on NGOs who use task-based committees to foster efficient goal achievement. Women, Food, and Agriculture Network (WFAN)-- as discussed in Women’s Activism and Globalization-- employ a similar structure, fostering personal responsibility in order  to “instigate change” by building community and sustaining relationships with farmworkers (144). Our ethics committee is cognate to the UN, in that it will monitor the efficacy and ethical compliance of our project. Just as in “Unlikely Godmother,” Margaret Snyder characterizes the United Nations as a “godmother,” which acted as a guardian and advocate for women’s issues (25). We are facing the global challenge of migrant farmworker rights based on local realities, specifically the lack of resources to farmworkers in the community of Fellsmere, FL. We will be participating in discussion that takes place on a global level with our global partner. By building solidarity between our local and global partners, and ourselves, we will either discover or develop new ideas to cater to the needs of the farmworker population.

Every member is accountable for his or her own attendance and participation. If a member is unable to attend an event, they must notify the scheduler. The Ethics Committee and “three strike” policy were conceived to deal with situations in which a member fails to be accountable for themselves.

Group effectiveness will be measured by involvement of the majority of class members at each event, as well as our ability to fulfill each of the goals we have set. We are also considering the individual gains of each class member, outside of the group as a whole, to be an accomplishment of overall group effectiveness. This includes phone banking with YAYA, fundraising, and planning. We will also strive to maintain sincere communication and ethical interactions with each other and our community partners. We will assess ourselves via individual surveys on group effectiveness.

Community Partner/Global Theme Profile:

We propose to address the larger systemic issues of the treatment of farmworkers, with an emphasis on women farmworkers. 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 those who produce the food equal access to the products they produce. As the price of food increases and becomes scarcer, women become malnourished, "as they eat last after providing for their children and family members" (Desai 21). One possible way of addressing this issue is to "produce food for local consumption" (Desai 24). To lay a foundation for both environmental and production sustainability, it is key that the community eats the food it grows. Local production and consumption can also indirectly address situations of "unsustainable exploitation of workers," who are denied not only equal access to food, but also other resources, such as safe housing and acceptable working conditions (Two Years 1). By establishing themselves as producers of their own food and giving recognition to both the unpaid and poorly paid labor, farmworkers can pave the way for change in regard to equal access and fair treatment.

We have not yet been able to contact a global partner. However, when we do, we will be able to find out more about their needs and goals as they relate to our own and therefore participate in both shared learning and activism.

By working in solidarity with YAYA, we are supporting activism enacted “to change the oppressive social, political and economic conditions of farmworkers” (“About”). Human rights violations such as those our local farmworkers face are worldwide issues and are experienced in many forms across many communities. While YAYA is “[i]nspired by the principles of nonviolence of the farmworker movement,” we are inspired by the efforts of YAYA and the organization’s slant towards working with, not simply for farmworker communities (“About”). As we work with each other and with YAYA, we will cultivate ethical activism through focusing on our communicative and social interactions.

Relation to Goals and Objectives for the Course: Because our class concerns the ways in which globalization and its discontents disproportionately affect minority groups, working with farmworkers is a way of putting the theory of our class directly into practice through a cooperative project that focuses on community organizing. In her essay, “The Challenges and Possibilities of Transnational Feminist Praxis,” published in the book Women’s Activism and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles and Transnational Politics, Nancy A. Naples states that many feminist NGOs are “transformed from advocates to professionals serving the needs of neoliberal states” (274). Our project is based on the exchange of communal knowledge and experience to grow and learn with the constituency we are serving, situating us as professionals working alongside them, rather than advocates speaking on their behalf or appealing to more powerful forces in pursuit of monetary dispensations. In the process, we are learning about the transnational modality of mobilization, while also stressing that our proposed efforts should work in concert with the expressed needs of the community, again emphasizing a “professional” versus “advocate” role. One of the most important aspects of the project is learning about and replicating the structure of an organization that does this kind of work on a global scale. The measure of our success lies not necessarily with a perfectly executed project, but rather, with lessons regarding cooperation that come from both its successes and failures. This sets it apart from normal, task-oriented activist work and situates it squarely within the discourse of service learning. We cannot succeed if we discursively displace the community we are working with by, as Trinh Minh-ha put it, “[inventing] needs” for them, so joining YAYA’s previously established project is an efficient, equitable solution (54).

3. The Project Proposal:

Our intention for this project is to forge relationships with farmworker communities on a local to global level, with a focus on women and how their lives are impacted by the work they do. We will accomplish our goals by dividing them up between the various aforementioned committees. We will begin developing a relationship with our local community partner, YAYA, by attending meetings and fulfilling their requested needs for gardening tools and long sleeve shirts. We will also be participating in the Fellsmere Community Garden Event, where we will be gardening and sharing and preparing a meal, while also learning from one another. We will determine the needs of our global partners through email and meet whatever need(s) that they express at that time.

We will complete our service-learning project via our combined resources as individuals, the resources we have available as UCF students, and the resources of our Orlando community. Through the expertise of YAYA and FWAF, we will be able to better understand the ways in which we can use our resources to best serve the needs of the farmworker community. We will be communicating as a group in order to continuously reevaluate our initial methodology, resources, and group organizational structure, in order to best serve our goals.

One of our immediate goals in supporting YAYA and FWAF in the Fellsmere community gardening day is to fundraise one shovel and one rake per student. Another goal is to fundraise the cost per person for our visit, which includes meals and transportation. These goals are feasible because we have access to different types of resources that will help our fundraising efforts, such as on-campus technology to create fundraiser advertisements, as well as access to various campus organizations that may support our fundraising events. Our most important goal is to support our community partner and their sustainable relationship building with farmworker communities. Our fundraising efforts will provide the Fellsmere community with the tools that they currently need and will use in the future. We will also be providing labor within the Fellsmere community garden and helping with the upkeep of the plots, a service that FWAF has asked YAYA and our Global class to provide. Through this project, we hope to help YAYA strengthen their established relationship with the Fellsmere community, and that through our collaborative efforts, we will create a sustainable relationship with our community partner.

Timeline:

1. Attend YAYA meetings – Sundays at 6:30pm 
2. Fundraising events – dates TBD 
3. Fellsmere Community Garden Day – March 31st  
4. Debriefing meeting – date TBD

Works Cited

Desai, Manisha. Women's Activism and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles and Transnational Politics. By Nancy A. Naples and Manisha Desai. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print.

Naples, Nancy A. "The Challenges and Possibilities of Transnational Feminist Praxis."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.

Minh-ha, Trinh T. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. 1st ed. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. Print.

Snyder, Margaret. "Unlikely Godmother: The UN and the Global Women's Movement." Ed. Aili Mari. Tripp. Global Feminism: Transnational Women's Activism, Organizing, and Human Rights. Ed. Myra Marx. Ferree. 1st ed. New York: New York UP, 2006. 24-50. 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.

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