WFWA
ABOUT US
0%
Government funding
40
Years of experience
30K
Members signed
100%
Volunteer
WFWA is a 100% volunteer-run organizing drive of farm and other low-income seasonal, part-time and service workers and their families
Est. 1986
Since our founding in 1986, WESTERN FARM WORKERS ASSOCIATION (WFWA) has grown as a free and voluntary, unincorporated private self-help membership association. We assembled ourselves here in Yuba and Sutter Counties as an organizing drive of migrant and seasonal farm workers, service workers and other low-paid workers and our families, understanding the basic premise that there is strength in numbers. WFWA joins together those who realize that as long as any of us are left behind in poverty, none of us are safe. WFWA says we all need a living wage, and has been building the means to achieve those ends for four decades.
Purpose
As a total effort, the organizing drive seeks to alleviate our members’ most important problem - poverty - at its root. The organization performs neither acts of charity nor isolated acts of goodwill, but rather aids members in obtaining what is rightfully theirs in a context that promotes their best interests on all levels.
Photo courtesy of Michaela Harris/Appeal-Democrat
Accomplishments
Yearly: Growers and community organizations join with WFWA members to assist in WFWA’s annual Pre-Harvest Food Distribution to thousands of farm workers and their families throughout the Sacramento Valley.
Seasonally: WFWA runs a year-round budget savings program, including seasonal benefits, that aids hundreds of enrolled members and their families, totaling almost 2000 adults and their children, with backpacks and school supplies, holiday food baskets and toys, warm winter clothing and other seasonally requested items that save families thousands of dollars each year.
Monthly: Volunteer medical professionals present medical education and information sessions on diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer and how to prevent workplace injuries. Attorneys present “Know Your Law” sessions on areas of law of interest to low-income workers.
Weekly: Volunteer advocates assist dozens of WFWA members preventing shutoffs of electricity or restoring disconnected power to their homes.
Daily: WFWA provides a material manifestation of hope by uniting the most exploited workers along with allies from all sectors of our community through filling emergency food requests, providing organizer training and demonstrating how to fight and win collective victories.
This is WFWA
The solutions to the problems of poverty must be driven by those who are living them. But low-income workers cannot do it alone. WFWA works daily to unite with others who share our concerns including professionals, students, clergy, professors, business owners and others like you who are needed to expand WFWA’s material manifestation of hope through organization.
WFWA’s programs add value to our communities 365 days a year. Through every food distribution and medical session, averted utility shutoff or eviction, WFWA members and volunteers demonstrate every day that it is possible to deliver, responding to the needs of the lowest-paid workers.
Our rallying cry is “Don’t mourn, organize!”
WFWA is totally independent, 100% volunteer and has never taken a dime of government funding. Members learn organizing skills and are encouraged to use those skills to help the next member in need as an important part of the process of building WFWA’s self-help, 11-Point Benefit Program. The benefit program addresses immediate hardships that often prevent us from working together to forge long-term solutions to our economic problems.
Doctors and lawyers donate their professional skills through the preventive medical benefit and legal benefit, to resolve immediate problems and ward off more serious ones. Business owners contribute resources and services ranging from food and printing WFWA’s literature, to auto repairs that keep WFWA’s vehicles on the road. Clergy introduce us to their congregations and hundreds of others come through our doors to volunteer however they can.
WFWA members who choose to be part of the decision-making process that guides the course of the association’s benefit program and the organizing drive’s strategy meet weekly. Together we forge solutions to problems; for example, how to best address the root of problems like official policies causing economic devastation in our communities.
WFWA is 100% volunteer — that means we rely on people like you to invest your time in helping to advance this vital work! Call 530-790-0980 today, and ask how you can get involved!
