Farmworker-Led Food Distributions

Alianza Nacional de Campesinas is the first national women farmworkers’ organization in the U.S. created by current and former women farmworkers, along with women who hail from farmworker families. While their work spans nationally, Polo’s Pantry works in collaboration with them to bring food to farmworkers in the Coachella Valley and in Santa Maria (below). Another leader in this distribution is Lideres Campesinas, a statewide organization that works to strengthen the leadership of farmworker women and youth so that they can be agents of economic, social and political change and ensure their human rights.

Polo’s Pantry is the only LA-based food justice organization that is feeding and organizing with farmworkers directly. We do this because we understand that farmworkers are the lifeline of our world-- without them, we would be without nourishment, without life. Another LA-based organization contributing care to this distribution is Water Drop LA. They provide volunteers and filtered water as many farmworkers do not hav access to clean drinking water, which is especially dangerous during hot summer months when temperatures reach 115 degrees in the desert.

We see the exploitation of our farmworkers through unlivable wages & working conditions along with a deeply entrenched social dissonance between consumers and the labor of food production. Farmworkers have always provided for us but they themselves have not always been provided for. Our food distributions, in partnership with Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, seek to change this reality by humanizing farmworkers and providing them the resources that they need to feed their own communities.