FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, January 21, 2003
Contact:  D. Michael McCarron
Executive Director
(850) 222-3803

Tallahassee -- The Florida Catholic Conference (FCC) has received a new grant to promote justice for seasonal farmworkers in Florida.  The grant comes from the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) and is renewable for two additional years.

“For years, the Bishops have urged public officials to do more to protect the human rights of the people who harvest Florida’s abundant crops,” said D. Michael McCarron, Executive Director of the FCC.  “Thanks to the CCHD grant, we’ll finally have the resources to concentrate on the complex issues involved.”

For the estimated 200,000 farm workers in the state, those issues include fair compensation, equal protection under labor laws, workplace safety, decent housing, access to health care and education, and safe transportation.

To deepen their efforts, the Bishops of Florida created a standing Committee on Farmworker Justice last year.  Bishop John H. Ricard, SSJ, is Episcopal moderator to this committee. The new grant monies will support the committee’s policy analysis and its outreach to farmworkers, growers, public officials, and the general public.  The funding facilitates continued work with farmworker organizations and their advocates, through the Alliance for Farmworker Justice that the FCC and the Florida Council of Churches helped create in 1999.

The FCC hired Nancy Powers to coordinate the new project.  Powers has a doctorate in political science from the University of Notre Dame, where she also studied Catholic social teaching. Her research on Latin America included a year of fieldwork in poor and working class neighborhoods of Buenos Aires.  Her book, Grassroots Expectations of Democracy and Economy: Argentina in Comparative Perspective, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2001.

Powers was a member of the Florida State University faculty from 1995-2002, where she taught courses in Latin American Politics, development, and human rights.  She previously taught at Lafayette College and Vanderbilt University and was a legislative aide in the Ohio House of Representatives.

“Powers understands Catholic Social Teaching, politics, economics, and poverty.  She has the experience to move from the micro-level to the global, and from the fields and community meeting halls to the growers’ or legislators’ offices,” McCarron said.

Powers said she is pleased to put her research and teaching background to work for social justice.  “It’s a privilege and a challenge to work for the Bishops on this project.  The issues are complicated and affect everyone in Florida-farmworkers, growers, our state and local economies, and consumers.  I see the project as an effort to build ladders and bridges between people who see their interests as opposed, in order to achieve greater justice for the most vulnerable,” she said.