By Bread Staff
In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, Bread for the World for the past few weeks has been celebrating the resilience, creativity, and spirit of Hispanic men and women. This is the final installment of the blog post series.
Today, we celebrate the civil rights activist and labor leader Dolores Huerta. It was her brief period as an elementary teacher in Stockton, Calif. where she first learned of the plight of farm workers. Huerta noticed that her students, many of them children of farm workers, were living in poverty and did not have enough food to eat.
As a result, she became one of the founders of the Stockton chapter of the Community Services Organization (CSO). The organization worked to improve the social and economic conditions of farm workers and to fight discrimination.
To further her work, she created the Agricultural Workers Association (AWA) to ensure migrant farm workers were treated properly. The organization worked on many causes including urging politicians to allow migrant workers without U.S. citizenship to receive public assistance.
Huerta later co-founded the United Farm Workers union with Cesar Chavez.
Huerta made it her mission in life to help those who needed help the most. This election season you can do the same by joining the Vote to End Hunger campaign.
The campaign will mobilize grassroots supporters to make sure the 2016 presidential candidates focus on ending hunger, alleviating poverty, and creating opportunity in the United States and across the world.
Bread for the World views the 2016 presidential election as a critical centerpiece on the path toward ending hunger by 2030 as it seeks to get leaders in place who are aligned with that goal. Bread has already gotten into the fray with a project of gathering videos from all of the presidential candidates to bring awareness of their plans on addressing hunger and poverty.
And now Bread is part of the Vote to End Hunger coalition. The coalition’s campaign of the same name was launched October 13 during the Iowa Hunger Summit in Des Moines.
Bread is committed to raising poverty and hunger as election issues in the months leading up to the votes for Congress and president in November 2016. Our aim is to make sure the new president puts hunger and poverty in his/her top five domestic and top 20 international priorities.
We also want the new members of Congress taking office in 2017 to work in tandem with the president on these goals. Together, they can enact legislation that sets our nation – and the world – on a course toward ending hunger by 2030.
