May 26, 2021
As COVID-19 bore down on New York state, the Cornell Farmworker Program used mobile phone technology to provide rapid guidance and clear health information in multiple languages to the state’s farmworkers. Now, new federal funding will expand the program and further integrate the initiative with Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE).
The funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA-NIFA) will help the program continue to reach more than 3,000 New York farmworkers with critical health and legal information. The three-year, $90,000 grant will help integrate Cornell research across colleges with on-the-ground training for farmworkers from the Cornell Farmworker Program and CCE.
Grant expands Cornell efforts to reach New York farmworkers miragenews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from miragenews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
11:14
New York state has announced a targeted effort to vaccinate farmworkers and employees of food production facilities against COVID-19. The state says it will work with local health departments and Federally Qualified Health Centers to bring pop-up vaccination sites to work locations.
WAMC s Jim Levulis spoke with Mary Jo Dudley, director of the Cornell Farmworker Program, about the effort.
Dudley: At the beginning of February, the Biden administration set aside 11 million additional vaccines for farmworkers, homeless people, populations with limited English and those living in public housing, specifically, because we understand that these populations have technological challenges as well as linguistic challenges. And so making sure that there are extra vaccines that could go through the appropriate organizations is important. So to give you a little bit of background on that, we have in New York State three federally designated migrant health centers, providers, these are the
WARSAW â A series of upcoming vaccination clinics in Wyoming County is aimed at farmers, farm workers, ag support businesses, employees and their families.
The clinics are scheduled for April 22 and 29. Itâs an effort by the county Health Department, the Cornell Cooperative Extension, the Farm Bureau and the Cornell Farmworker Program.
The agencies are reaching out to the agricultural community to participate. Times and locations were not specified.
Contact the Cornell Cooperative Extension at wyomingcountycce@cornell.edu or (585) 786-2251 for more information.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Johnson Newspapers 7.1
This is viewer supported news. Please do your part today.Donate
There are about 2.5 million farmworkers around the U.S., many of them undocumented immigrants working under dangerous and exploitive circumstances without sick leave or healthcare. Despite their status as essential workers, however, many farmworkers are facing an uphill battle to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Estella Cisneros, legal director of the Agricultural Worker Program for California Rural Legal Assistance, says an uneven rollout in California as well as technical barriers have left many farmworkers unvaccinated. “There’s been a lot of inequities that we’ve seen,” she says. We also speak with Mary Jo Dudley, director of the Cornell Farmworker Program, who says it’s “puzzling” that farmworkers in New York state were left out of the current phase of vaccine distribution “at a time when we’ve seen an increasing number of COVID cases among the farmworker population.”