As 2023 draws to a close, farmworkers with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers are celebrating the organization’s 30th anniversary. In the last 30 years, the CIW — which began as a loose gathering of farmworkers meeting weekly in a borrowed church hall in the small, crossroads town of Immokalee — has grown in size and success to become the founder of the Presidential Medal-winning Fair Food Program, the leading social responsibility program in the US agricultural industry today, and of the Worker-driven Social Responsibility model, the new paradigm for human rights protection in global supply chains to which the FFP gave rise. And along the way on this remarkable journey, many of the CIW’s longtime farmworker-leaders have emerged as key agents of change in the trillion-dollar food industry. 

With the tireless leadership of farmworkers themselves, the CIW forged the Fair Food Program from the ground up – an unprecedented  partnership among workers, buyers, growers, and consumers to monitor and enforce the basic human rights of farmworkers by harnessing the purchasing power of some of the world’s larges food corporations. Lupe Gonzalo, an indigenous Guatemalan farmworker who worked for years in Immokalee’s tomato fields before joining the CIW staff, knows all too well the life of a farmworker outside the protections of the FFP. 

Raised in a rural village in Guatemala, Lupe journeyed to the United States in hope of finding a better life — but was instead met with the kind of outrageous exploitation that remains all-too-common in agriculture and low-wage work beyond the protections of the Fair Food Program. Once she found out about the Fair Food Program, however — which happened during a visit by the CIW’s Worker-to-Worker Education Team to the farm where she was picking tomatoes in the early days of the FFP — she immediately saw an opportunity to right the historic wrongs the plagued US fields, and has never looked back since. 

Through her more than a decade of work with the CIW, Lupe has become a prominent leader in a global human rights movement centered around the Worker-driven Social Responsibility model, which ensures humane working and living standards for low-wage workers, and which was born in the same Immokalee, FL, fields in which Lupe toiled when she first arrived to the U.S. 

Now, Lupe’s leadership in human rights has been recognized by The Packer, a leading agricultural industry publication, and we are overjoyed to share that recognition with you. She has been named as one of the 2023 Packer 25, the publication’s “annual tribute to 25 leaders, innovators and agents of change across the fresh produce supply chain.” 

Please join us in congratulating Lupe, and make sure to read the full profile below: 

LUPE GONZALO — SENIOR STAFF MEMBER AND LEADER, COALITION OF IMMOKALEE WORKERS

Lupe Gonzalo is a senior staff member and leader of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. She has worked in the agricultural fields of the U.S. for the last 12 years as a migrant farmworker, including in the harvesting of tomatoes, citrus, peppers and many other vegetables and fruits. 

As part of the Fair Food Program education team, Gonzalo and her colleagues conduct workers’ rights education in seven states along the East Coast throughout the year. Gonzalo also was a member of the CIW team working with Futures Without Violence, which collaborated with CIW and other Fair Food Program partners on the first sexual harassment training curriculum for the agricultural sector in the U.S. 

Drawing on her experience with the Fair Food Program, Gonzalo has helped to train, mentor and educate workers from other regions and industries on the Worker-Driven Social Responsibility model, assisting in those workers’ efforts to combat human rights abuses throughout the U.S. and the globe.

Gonzalo’s work at the CIW includes hosting daily radio shows on the CIW’s low-power community FM radio station, leading the weekly women’s group meetings, receiving complaints of abuses in the fields and managing wage-theft claims. 

Gonzalo also represents the CIW at a national level, speaking publicly on the challenges faced by farmworkers in Florida, both during major actions with thousands of consumers and in dozens of presentations throughout the year. She was recently featured on CNN Freedom Project’s recent series on the Fair Food Program, quoted in Fast Company coverage and was named a Community Trailblazer by the Equal Voice magazine.