Summary

One-fourth of all ninth graders in the United States will not graduate from high school within four years, despite the fact that the 21st Century workplace requires more advanced knowledge and skills than ever before. Recognizing the need for a comprehensive strategy to keep teens in school and ensure that they graduate prepared for the future, AT&T awarded United Way Worldwide a contribution to start a new initiative – Family Engagement for High School Success (FEHS). This AT&T-supported initiative offered an invaluable opportunity to pioneer strategies for bringing families, school leaders, community partners, and students together to build a network of supports to keep students on the path to high school graduation, college or advanced training, and successful lives beyond. View PDF (to download, right click on the link and select "save link as")

Summary

Fifty harvests have come and gone since Edward R. Murrow’s “Harvest of Shame” aired on CBS, shocking the nation’s conscience with its grim portrait of the conditions suffered by the migrant workers who tended and harvested America’s crops. Since that time the faces of the workers have changed—the impoverished African-American and white workers of Murrow’s day have given way to a population that is now almost exclusively Latino, mostly Mexican, and undocumented. Yet despite decades of legislative, legal, and regulatory reforms, and periodic media exposés, the essential features of migrant farm laborers’ abusive working and living conditions have changed little, if at all. Today, as in 1960, America’s migrant farmworkers toil endless hours for subpoverty wages under some of the most dangerous working conditions in the nation. View PDF (to download, right click on the link and select "save link as")

Summary

This report details the human rights impact of the tobacco industry on North Carolina’s farmworkers. The research for this report was gathered through a unique methodology developed by the Canadian organization Rights & Democracy that allows communities to assess the impact of private sector investments on their human rights. This methodology empowers local communities, allowing them to be the key framers and research gatherers. In this case, Oxfam adapted the tool to look at private sector domestically and worked with FLOC members and staff to solicit input from all stakeholders involved in the tobacco supply chain. This included not only face to face interviews with tobacco farmworkers in North Carolina, but also interviews with tobacco companies, growers, nongovernmental organizations, and government officials, making it a truly multi-stakeholder assessment. As detailed in the report, rampant human rights abuses remain in the tobacco industry and a new industry-wide approach is needed that holds tobacco companies more accountable for the conditions in the fields. View Full Report

Summary

Information on state-of-the-art research and best practices in Education, Civil Rights, Health care, Community Change and Integration, Demographic data. A must-have for people working with immigrant issues in Missouri and the Heartland. View Full Report