TEDxFruitvale

Speakers

Speakers may not be confirmed. Check the event website for the latest lineup.

• Wayne Pacelle

  Wayne Pacelle is the president and chief executive officer of The Humane Society of the United States, the nation's largest animal protection organization with more than 11 million members and constituents, annual revenue of $130 million, and assets of more than $200 million. Pacelle's work on animal issues has been featured in thousands of newspapers and magazines across the country. He has been profiled in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, and has appeared on almost all of the major network television programs. Pacelle blogs daily at Wayne Pacelle: A Humane Nation. Pacelle is the author of the forthcoming book “The Bond: Our Kinship with Animals, Our Call to Defend Them,” published by William Morrow.

• Barry Estabrook

  Stints working on a dairy farm and a commercial fishing boat as a young man convinced Barry Estabrook that writing about how food was produced was a hell of a lot easier than actually producing it. Formerly a contributing editor at Gourmet magazine, he now writes for the the New York Times, the Washington Post, TheAtlantic.com, MarkBittman.com, and Saveur. His article for Gourmet on labor abuses in Florida’s Tomato fields received the 2010 James Beard Award for magazine feature writing. His book "Tomatoland," about how industrial agriculture has ruined the tomato in all ways – gastronomic, environmental, and in terms of labor abuse – was released in June 2011 by Andrews McMeel.

• Carlos Francisco Jackson

  Born and raised in Los Angeles, Carlos Jackson attended the University of California, Davis where he received his Bachelor of Science in Community and Regional Development and an M.F.A. in Painting, and was awarded the Robert Arneson Award for excellence in the M.F.A. program. In 2002 he was awarded a full fellowship to attend the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in central Maine. For the 2003-2004 year he held the David Shainberg Endowed Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. From 2003-2007 he taught in the Chicana/o Studies Program and Art Department at UC Davis and in the Fine Arts Department at Saint Michaels College in Vermont. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Chicana/o Studies Program and is Director of Taller Arte del Nuevo Amanecer, a community art center in Woodland, California. The University of Arizona Press has recently published his first book, Chicana and Chicano Art: ProtestArte.

• Hector Mora

  A former farmworker from Michoacán, Mexico, Hector is now in his 10th year of cultivating for the Agriculture and Land Based Training Association (ALBA) farm network. ALBA helps farmworkers and aspiring farmers with limited resources to grow and sell crops via two organic farms in Monterey County. Hector chooses what to grow based on the weather and grows crops such as strawberries, beets, carrots, fennel, and cilantro. He sells mostly wholesale produce, but has always stuck with the Old Town Salinas Farmer’s Market because he likes the idea of serving his local community. In addition to his work, his priorities are spending time with his family and playing with his children

• U. Roberto Romano

  Award-winning producer, director, director of photography, and still photographer Robin Romano is one of the most respected investigative filmmakers in the world. In addition to his film and photography, Robin is a human-rights educator and advocate whose knowledge and expertise is highly valued by policy makers at home and abroad. He has traveled extensively documenting human-rights issues for advocacy organizations including GoodWeave, Amnesty International, Free The Slaves and Human Rights Watch. His photography has been published in the Ford Foundation Quarterly, Stanford Review, New York Times, and other leading newspapers and magazines and widely exhibited. He is co-director (with Miki Mistrati) of The Dark Side of Chocolate, a feature documentary on slavery in the West Africa cocoa trade. His most recent film, The Harvest/La Cosecha, which follows three teenage migrant farmworkers across America, recently won both the Outstanding Filmmaker and Audience awards at the San Antonio Film Festival.

• Arturo Rodriguez

  Arturo Rodriguez i s continuing to build the union Cesar E. Chavez founded into a powerful voice for immigrant workers by increasing its membership and pushing historic legislation on immigration reform and worker rights. He seeks to fundamentally transform American agriculture by creating jobs offering workers decent pay, comprehensive health coverage, retirement security, protections against toxic poisons, job security and guarantees against discrimination and sexual harassment. Rodriguez has more than 37 years experience organizing farm workers, negotiating UFW contracts and leading numerous farm worker boycott and political drives across North America. He became active with the UFW’s grape boycott as a student at St. Mary’s University 1969. At the University of Michigan in 1971, where he earned an M.A. degree in social work, Rodriguez organized support for farm worker boycotts. He began serving full time with the UFW in 1973, when he first met Chavez, who became his mentor for 20 years. Since the Texas native took over the helm of the UFW upon the passing of its legendary founder in 1993, Rodriguez has increased union membership with an aggressive organizing and negotiating campaign. Among recent UFW victories under Rodriguez’s leadership are recent agreements with one of the nation’s top five largest vegetable growers, the biggest strawberry employer in the United States, the country’s largest winery, the biggest dairy in the U.S. as well as winery workers in Washington state and mushroom workers in Florida.

• Tim Galarneau

  Tim is a past Roots of Change Fellow who works as both a national organizing team representative for Real Food Challenge and an education and research program specialist on social issues for the Center for Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems(CASFS) focusing on farm to institution, community food systems, and student education and empowerment. In 2004 Tim founded the California Student Sustainability Coalition’s Foods Initiative that helped link and mobilize students across California toward creating policy and student empowerment toward greater sustainability and social justice in their food systems. Tim then joined forces with others across the U.S. to cofound the national Real Food Challenge (RFC) in 2008. RFC is working to shift over $1 billion in annual food procurement and consumption in colleges and universities in the United States by 2020 toward greater sustainability through key metrics and movement building strategies. In addition, on the national organizing scene, Tim is part of a diverse network of young leaders across the country, known as Live Real, that are creating a new “move-entity” for empowering youth and vulnerable communities toward changing their food systems. He lives with his wife and one-year-old twins, Ryder and Mason, in the CentralCoast of California.

• Nikki Henderson

  The Executive Director of People’s Grocery, Nikki Henderson leads a team invested in creating place-based change and health parity through improvements to the food system in West Oakland, California. Since arriving at People’s Grocery in 2010, Nikki has strengthened the connection between those interested in solving food access challenges to those invested in health and economic parity through citywide alliances with labor and environmental justice, expanding partnerships with health intuitions, and leadership development programs. Before People’s Grocery, Nikki worked for Green for All and Slow Food, national organizations pursuing food, health, and environmental progress. Nikki holds a Master’s Degree in African American Studies from UCLA.

• Joann Lo

  Joann is the Executive Director of the Food Chain Workers Alliance, a coalition of worker-based groups organizing to improve wages and working conditions for all workers along the food chain. The Alliance works to build a more sustainable food system that respects workers’ rights, based on the principles of social, environmental, and racial justice, in which everyone has access to healthy and affordable food. In 1997 Joann graduated from Yale University with a degree in Environmental Biology. She then was an organizer on campaigns with two Service Employee International Union locals in Los Angeles, which resulted in hundreds of workers at Catholic Healthcare West and Argenbright Security becoming new union members. In early 2001 Joann co-launched the Garment Worker Center. As lead organizer, she supported garment workers in Los Angeles who led a successful boycott against young women’s retailer Forever 21, a campaign memorialized in the Emmy award-winning documentary Made in L.A. In 2005 Joann joined Enlace, a strategic alliance of low-wage workers centers and unions in the U.S. and Mexico, and a year later became Co-Executive Director. In November 2009 Joann joined the Food Chain Workers Alliance.

• Rick Nahmias

  Rick Nahmias is a professional photographer, writer, filmmaker, and author of two books, whose work focuses on the faces and stories of marginalized communities. Rick’s formal training as a cook, along with his exploration of California’s agricultural workforce in his body of work entitled “The Migrant Project: Contemporary California Farm Workers,” planted his feet in both the foodie and food justice worlds. These varied interests, along with his conviction that that all people everywhere deserve access to fresh nutritious food, culminated in 2009 with his founding what has grown into Southern Caliornia’s largest urban harvesting for the hungry non-profit, Food Forward.

• Sandy Brown

  Sandy Brown’s work on farm labor and sustainable food systems attempts to bridge some of the many divides between agriculture, activism, and academia. She has worked with Swanton Berry Farm since 2003, focusing on human resources and strategies for promoting social justice in agriculture, both within and beyond the farm gate. The first certified organic farm in the United States to sign a labor contract with the United Farm Workers (UFW), Swanton Berry Farm offers its workers low-income housing on site, health insurance, vacation and holiday pay, a pension, and other benefits including an employee stock ownership program. Sandy currently divides her time between farm life and graduate studies in geography at UC Berkeley, where she researches agricultural labor relations in California and Latin America.

• Adelfo Antonio

  With 23 years working at Swanton Berry Farm, Adelfo Antonio is one of the company’s longest-term employees and is currently the production crew supervisor. He appreciates Swanton’s organic production methods, positive work environment, and the benefits that come with union representation. Originally from the Mexican State of Oaxaca, he currently lives with his wife and three children in Santa Cruz.

• Amelia Ceja

  Amelia Ceja’s first encounter with viticulture was in 1967 when, as a 12-year old immigrant from Jalisco, Mexico, she harvested her first grapes in Robert Mondavi’s Tokalon Vineyard in the Napa Valley. Today she is president of Ceja Vineyards, her family’s winery in Northern California. Ceja Vineyards has twice been named “Best Boutique Winery in Napa & Sonoma” by Best of Napa and Sonoma Valley Magazine. In 2005 the California legislature recognized Amelia as “Woman of the Year” for “breaking the glass ceiling in a very competitive business,” in 2008 she was named Business Woman of the Year by the Sacramento Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and honored as the “most outstanding female leader, innovator and visionary in the wine field in the North Bay” by North Bay Business Journal.

• Dalia Ceja

  The daughter and granddaughter of immigrant vineyard workers, Dalia Ceja grew up surrounded by vineyards in Northern California’s Napa Valley. Today Dalia serves as Ceja’s director of sales and marketing. She and Amelia together promote awareness of authentic Mexican cuisine and its affinity for wine on the winery’s website, YouTube, and on her own blog, The Ole! Report. In 2010 Dalia cohosted the Napa segment of MSN.com’s “Rediscover” web series and in 2011 she was named ‘Woman of the Year” by the Napa Valley Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. Dalia is working on her MBA in Wine Marketing at Sonoma State University.

• Gerardo Reyes-Chavez

  Gerardo has worked in the fields since age 11, first as a peasant farmer in Zacatecas, Mexico, and then in the fields of Florida picking oranges, tomatoes, and watermelon. He joined the Coalition of Immokalee Workers shortly after his arrival in the United States in 2000, when his fellow farmworker roommates, who had previously escaped a violent slavery operation hidden in the swamp south of Immokalee, FL, invited him to come to the CIW’s Wednesday evening community meetings. Since then Gerardo has been a key leader of the CIW, his work focusing both at the community level, mobilizing the Immokalee community around national actions in the CIW’s Campaign for Fair Food, and more broadly at the consumer level across the country, raising awareness in support of the Campaign through presentations, workshops, and speeches. Gerardo has helped investigate several modern-day slavery operations, including going undercover to work on tomato farms and interviewing workers who have escaped from violent, brutal operations. He is today a key member of the CIW’s negotiating team in talks with retail food and tomato industry leaders and has been instrumental in forging many of the CIW’s Fair Food agreements. Gerardo also helps to run Radio Conciencia, the low-power community radio station through which the CIW is creating a space to share the diversity of cultures, languages, and experiences that make up Immokalee.

• Maria Catalan

  A third-generation migrant farmworker, Maria was born in Guerrero, Mexico, where she helped her parents on the family farm before immigrating to the United States in 1986. For many years she worked for California’s biggest farms, picking broccoli and carrots. Then she enrolled in a program at the Rural Development Center in Salinas Valley that provides agricultural training toSpanish-speaking immigrants with limited means, and later was able to begin farming under the auspices of the nonprofit Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association. Maria and her family now cultivate 14 acres in Hollister, CA, and sell at 13 farmers markets as well as to high-end restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has volunteered with Lideres Campesinas, an organization for farmworker women, and has set up farms stands at the USDA WIC offices in Salinas and at schools. Maria was honored with a Certificate of Appreciation from the USDA, an award usually reserved for organizations, not individuals.

• Sanjay Rawal

  Sanjay Rawal’s most recent film, Challenging Impossibility, about the unlikely weightlifting exploits of the spiritual teacher Sri Chinmoy, premiered at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival and has played in over 50 festivals since then. In addition to making films, Sanjay runs a small consulting firm, the Illumine Group, that specializes in strategy for large- and small-scale agriculture projects both in the U.S. and abroad. Sanjay’s current production is an as-of-yet untitled feature-length documentary that focuses on farm labor, the roots of inequity in the agriculture sector, and current movements inspired to inform and enlighten consumers. He and his crew have criss-crossed California, Florida, and the Northeast numerous times this summer documenting stories of workers, farmers, and labor advocates in the hope of developing a tool for the dozens of incredible advocacy organizations he’s encountered.

• Andrea Christina Mercado

  Andrea Cristina Mercado is Lead Organizer at Mujeres Unidas y Activas (MUA), a grassroots Latina immigrant women’s organization in the San Francisco Bay Area. Andrea coordinates MUA’s campaign for Workers Rights Inside and Outside the Home which highlights the intersections of immigrant, worker, and women’s rights. She is currently leading a statewide effort to include domestic workers in labor laws and is one of the co-founders of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. She has also lived and worked in Bahia, Brazil with IPETERRAS, a sustainable agriculture project organizing against free trade agreements and as Global Justice Organizer for the Miami Workers Center.

• Heather Franzese

  Heather Franzese has been working for more than 12 years to improve the lives of vulnerable farmers and workers in global supply chains. Last year, she launched Fair Trade USA’s Fair Trade Certified™ Apparel & Linens program in the U.S., a new way for consumers to vote with their dollars for an alternative to sweatshops. Heather brings together industry experience managing CSR for Columbia Sportswear Company’s licensed and collegiate categories, a fundraising track record of channeling $4 million in social impact philanthropy to Fair Trade certification, and field experience working with small-scale farmers for the Peace Corps in Mali. She holds an MPP in Political and Economic Development from Harvard Kennedy School.