Social: #NACHCEvents
Twitter: @NACHC
Instagram: @nachc
Facebook: @nachc
Website: https://www.nachc.org/conferences/agricultural-worker-health/
The Conference for Agricultural Worker Health is the only conference dedicated solely to the health and well-being of America’s migratory and seasonal agricultural workers and their families. After thoughtful consideration, the 2021 Conference for Agricultural Worker Health will be held May 4-6 in a virtual format. The National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC) sponsors this conference each year to bring together leaders in migrant health to learn from each other to improve the health and well-being of this population.
Community and Migrant Heath Centers (C/MHCs) serve one million migratory and seasonal agricultural workers. This represents approximately 22% of the estimated number who reside in the country. Clearly, much work is left of be done to increase the reach to this population. Three years ago, NACHC’s Committee for AG Worker Health launched the AG Worker Access 2020 Campaign and established a 12-member Task Force to develop more effective outreach efforts, identify new models and strategies, provided training and technical assistance all designed to better reach this population. Since, we have served over 100,000 new farmworker families. While this is a modest increase, given the current political climate facing this population and other immigrant communities, some challenges and barriers persist that contributed to this modest increase. However, in spite of these challenges, our collective efforts helped reach new farmworker families.
Since the inception of the campaign, we have learned that we cannot be as effective by simply working within the health center world alone. Rather, we must work closely with other like-minded organizations at the local, state and national level. The Task Force has been re-configured to broaden the membership of the Task Force beyond community health centers. The Task Force now includes representatives from entities such as farmworker housing projects; migrant and seasonal head start grantees; faith based organizations; migrant education, to name a few. We know the campaign is working, but we must do better, we can and we are.