Fair Food Program Education and Operations Coordinator

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), the award-winning human rights organization, is hiring an Education and Operations Coordinator with responsibilities encompassing its groundbreaking Fair Food Program (FFP) and broader work on the Campaign for Fair Food and community organizing. The position is based out of Immokalee, FL.

The Education Coordinator works with a dynamic multi-lingual team of farmworker leaders who speak Spanish, English, Haitian Creole, and Mayan languages. Worker-to-worker education sessions are held in rural fields and farm offices, primarily in Florida from November to May, in Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Virginia during the summer season, as well as in Colorado and California. The team also conducts overseas sessions on FFP farms in Chile and South Africa. FFP farmworkers harvest tomato, peaches, corn, tulips, and other crops. The CIW’s expanding work spans a local, national, and international landscape, ranging from the ongoing community-based work in Immokalee and national consumer education to the implementation of the Fair Food Program nationwide and replication of the CIW’s model in a wide variety of countries and industries across the world.

FFP education sessions result in a network of thousands of worker monitors who are monitoring their own rights, ensuring that the worker-created Code of Conduct is respected. The curriculum uses popular education art and techniques to discuss the Fair Food Program’s protections including the right to work free of labor trafficking, sexual violence, and retaliation as well as how to report rights violations to the 24/7 hotline, the swift investigation process, and how the Code is enforced by market consequences. The team collaborates with the FFP’s auditing and monitoring body, the Fair Food Standards Council (FFSC), when complaints are brought to the team’s attention.

RESPONSIBILITIES 

Education

• Regular communication and coordination with farm owners, farm supervisors, FFSC auditors, and farmworkers
• Drafting and maintaining education session reports in English and Spanish in the FFP worker feedback and complaints database
• Scheduling of education sessions in coordination with FFSC audits
• Reporting complaints, including forced labor, from outside FFP farms to government agencies, law enforcement, or others

Operations

• Liaising with a variety of external partners including worker organizations, academic experts, agribusiness owners, corporate representatives, consumer allies, government officials, law enforcement, journalists, and others
• Interpreting and translating (Spanish/English) for in-person and virtual meetings as well as written materials
• Coordinating high-level delegations and visits to Immokalee
• Assisting with forced labor, sexual assault, and labor abuse cases and investigations, including regional travel and outreach to follow up on leads, accompanying survivors and witnesses, and research
• Providing support for ongoing Immokalee-based organizing efforts such as the CIW Women’s Group and the CIW’s local low-power FM station Radio Conciencia

Investigative experience is a plus.

Periodic national and international travel is also required in support of the CIW’s broader work. Can involve presenting and public speaking, and interaction with students, corporate buyers, consumers, and faith-based organizations. While CIW Staff may choose to commute from Fort Myers and Naples, please note that the presence of the Fair Food Program Education and Operations Coordinator in the office is integral to the position, given responsibilities in the Immokalee community and on local farms. As such, this position is fully on-site in Immokalee with occasional travel.

The position involves:

• Working in rural agricultural areas, often outdoors
• Working and driving in the early morning hours in season (sessions are held when the farm workday starts)
• Highly-organized, multi-level coordination
• Facilitation 
• Strategic thinking and excellent judgment
• Ability to work with a wide range of communities and partners
• Working in a rural agricultural context
• Collaborative work style

COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS 

This is a full-time position, sometimes including weekend hours, with a fair salary based on founding principles of the CIW, and very generous health care benefits, including dental. Further details upon inquiry.

The CIW is seeking a mission-driven individual who is comfortable speaking and writing in Spanish and English, additional languages a plus. Experience living and working in rural overseas or U.S. settings is recommended. Flexibility in relating to people from diverse nationalities, languages, different work and business cultures is a necessity. Nimble thinking, curiosity, creativity, and a sense of humor are also essential.

ABOUT THE COALITION OF IMMOKALEE WORKERS

The CIW is a Presidential Medal-winning, worker-led human rights organization based in Immokalee, Florida, recognized for its impact in combatting long-standing human rights abuses in the agricultural industry from wage theft and dangerous working conditions to sexual assault and forced labor. The CIW’s groundbreaking work — including the development of the Fair Food Program, launched in 2011 — has not only led the charge in remedying egregious human rights violations in agriculture, it has created an entirely new, proven path to prevention, to actually eradicating those abuses altogether.