Background
The Northeast Network of Immigrant Farming Programs (NNIFP) was formed in 2002 with the intent of strengthening local Immigrant Farming Projects (IFPs) through sharing of information, strategies, resources, and building capacity of farmers and program partners. Collaboration between groups prevents “reinventing the wheel” and offers a cost-effective strategy projects can use to enhance services and programs to immigrants and other limited-resource farmers. Priorities are to share lessons learned, visit each other’s training farms, and develop intra-regional strategies for marketing efforts, training programs and policy initiatives.
Objectives and Activities for the Northeast Network
Strengthen the work of NNIFP partners
The Northeast Network holds three to four networking meetings during the year. These provide participants with opportunities to share strategies for program implementation, relate “lessons learned,” plan training activities and other activities of the partnership covering communication, policy, outreach, and sharing resources (e.g., training materials, videos, and literature). Meetings are held at different locations around the region, and allow for site visits to farm projects in tandem.
NNIFP Provider Training-of-Trainers activities
A high priority for participants is to organize and participate in joint training activities. This approach increases the cost-effectiveness of such endeavors, and enhances their impact by bringing many talented people together to learn and share in the training experience. Training of trainers involves IFP staff and partners.
A. Plain Language Training
Although there is a wealth of publications available on farming, most are written for audiences with much more advanced education and literacy than most immigrants have achieved. Also, the content is usually too advanced in content for beginning farmers who lack formal agricultural training, financial training, and other relevant skills. For this reason, we organized Plain Language training. Plain language writing is an approach to writing that helps make writing clear and simple and more accessible to readers, and used to mean clear, reader-friendly graphic design in printed documents. This Plain Language Training also focuses on communicating across cultures. Plain Language helps to reach culturally diverse audiences with appropriate messages and materials. A lack of culturally appropriate materials can cause serious problems for an organization and the individuals it serves.
B. Anti-racism and Cross-Cultural Training
Many immigrant farming projects have hands-on experience in negotiating cultural barriers, yet few people have training in working with so many different cultures and without this knowledge, it can be difficult to appropriately disseminate critical information and effectively encourage farmers to communicate across cultures. The anti racism and cross-cultural communications training builds on the practical knowledge and experience already found within these projects, and better equips staff, farmers and other service providers with the skills to break down the barriers between farmers who come from incredibly diverse backgrounds and have dramatically different agricultural backgrounds, cultures, languages, and learning and communication styles. The training improves the capacity of projects to appropriately disseminate critical agricultural information to immigrant farmers, and provides staff and farmers with improved skills to address cultural and racial prejudices, and to more successfully navigate these disparate farmer populations that they serve.