La Peña will be a drop off for a School Supply Drive organized by Food Empowerment Project!
Below are the details:
Food Empowerment Project (F.E.P.) is organizing a Bay Area school supply drive for the children of farm workers from Monday, July 13, through Monday, July 27.
The farm workers who pick our food are victims of an unjust system that benefits corporations over workers, profit over people, and greed over families. These workers strive to get by on very little income, and parents and grandparents often cannot afford to buy their children the school supplies they need.
While F.E.P. works in other ways to challenge this system, we want to do our best to give farm workers the support they deserve.
Below is a list of the school supplies that are needed:
Backpacks (in great demand)
Calculators
Crayons
Colored markers
Erasers
Lined notebook paper
Pencils and pens
Pencil boxes or plastic zip bags that fit into 3-hole notebooks
Pencil sharpeners
Plain blank notebook paper with 3-holes to fit into notebooks
Plastic notebooks
Rulers
Spiral notebooks
If possible, please buy non-toxic supplies*.
Drop-off locations are located throughout the Bay Area.
Donations will be given to the children of farm workers in the Watsonville/Salinas area (some of whom live in the labor camps), as we are working with the Center for Farmworker Families*, and some of the school supply donations will also be given to the Graton Day Labor Center* for the farm worker family members who frequent the Center looking for job opportunities.
Any school supplies that remain after these distributions will be taken to the impoverished villages of Jalisco’s high mountains for farm family children. The school supplies, in turn, will provide farm families with a strong foundation and incentive to remain in Mexico for their children’s education.
In 2011, we donated clothes and some school supplies. In 2013, we organized our first school supply drive in the Bay Area, and last year we organized a food supply drive in the Bay Area for the farm workers and their families as part of the farm worker appreciation day that we helped to coordinate in Salinas. All the recipients were so thankful for these donations.
Thank YOU for your support of families who work so hard helping to put the food on our tables.
Photos above are of our wonderful recipients from 2013.
*Please note, although Food Empowerment Project is referring to the work of another organization, we do not necessarily endorse the entire content of their website or mission.
