What We Do

Founded in 2006, the UFW Foundation is a nonprofit organization (501c3) that advocates for workers’ rights and protections for farm workers across the United States and provides educational outreach and critical services such as immigration legal services to low-income rural communities. With its core purpose being to empower communities to ensure human dignity, the UFW Foundation has mobilized farm workers across the country to advocate for more equitable policies like immigration reform, pesticide protections, heat standards, hazard pay, and other worker protections. It has engaged constituents in systemic change to break the cycle of poverty while also providing critical services in California, Arizona, Michigan, Georgia and Washington state, and is one of the largest federally accredited immigration legal service providers in rural California.

The UFW Foundation has successfully advocated for overtime pay in California, helped strengthen the State’s heat protection laws, and contributed to the passage of federal legislation that provided pandemic relief for farm workers, and, as a result, distributed $23 million in direct emergency relief assistance payments to farm workers from 2020-2022. In 2023, the UFW Foundation served at least 211,000 farm workers through immigration legal services, COVID-19 pandemic disaster relief, storm recovery services, and a call center in California for farm workers to call if their employers violated employment-related laws, among other services.