In coordination with funders as well as technical assistance from NC Office of Rural Health
COVID-19 Response Team, Partners in Health, and The Free Clinics in Hendersonville, North
Carolina, NC FIELD’s Sembrando Salud project has secured clinical support and free
prescriptions for the agricultural workforce during the days and times workers can participate in
health services.
Campbell University Community Care Clinic mobile health units will deploy in farmworker
communities beginning March 8, 2021 and offer primary care with expansion expected into
women’s health and dental at a later date for our rural, uninsured, and vulnerable communities.
“I look forward to the day my community achieves equal access to the human right to remain
healthy while ensuring North Carolina’s agribusiness continues to thrive, and the grocery store
shelves remain full of fresh produce and other commodities. COVID-19 made stunningly clear
the deficits that exist in rural eastern North Carolina and how deadly those gaps can be. We
regularly lose dear friends and family members to chronic disease due to a lack of education
about how best to care for ourselves, our children, and our elderly. COVID-19 exposed us to a
death and disability rate unlike any our community has ever seen due to our lack of information,
education, and health resources. We seek affordable and accessible health care and the right to
access healthy food supplies. Most of the workforce live in rural and isolated areas, cannot
drive legally to a grocery store, or find adequate transportation to drive the 30 minutes needed
to find an adequate food supply. We lack internet access and suffer very poor cell phone
reception. This lack of attention to a workforce that directly contributes to nearly 78 billion dollars
to agriculture and food industries is willfully ignorant, and woefully inadequate,” states NC
FIELD Executive Director, Yesenia Cuello.
NC FIELD is grateful for the generous support and the continued advocacy of foundations like
Z. Smith Reynolds and Resourceful Communities, two organizations that steadfastly created a
firm foundation for direct services to child agricultural workers and their parents over the past
decade. Recent support for the COVID-19 testing and emergency assistance, ACA insurance
enrollment and advocacy, and capacity building projects has created momentum for NC FIELD
and its investors. The success of Sembrando Salud is the result of utilizing the powerful
integration of being an organization created by farmworker children for their community. NC
FIELD seeks ongoing support to continue to train members of the farmworker community to be
community health workers and health promoters, and focus on advocacy to build the
infrastructure needed by those who keep state coffers full, and your communities fed.