Interview Notes: Illinois Migrant Council
Last Wednesday (June 30th, 2021), we held our first stakeholder interview! Ebuwa reached out to the Illinois Migrant Council (IMC) in mid-June and we were fortunate to hear they would be willing to speak with us. To protect their privacy, we will refer to our interviewee as E.
Who is the IMC?
The Illinois Migrant Council has been serving migrant and seasonal farmworkers, including children, in Illinois since the late 1960s. See their brochure here.
Mission: "The Illinois Migrant Council or "IMC" is a community-based non-profit organization with the primary mission of promoting employment, education, health, housing, and other opportunities for migrant and seasonal farmworkers (MSFW) and their families to achieve economic self-sufficiency and stability."
The IMC is supported by the following agencies: U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Department of Education, Illinois Department of Commerce and Community Affairs, and Illinois State Board of Education. Learn how you can support the IMC's work here.
Interview Notes
Ebuwa and Julian prepared a set of interview questions intended to help us construct a Causal Loop Diagram (CLD), or model, of the interviewee's perspective on child farm work. The interview was scheduled for 30 minutes, but E graciously allowed us to continue speaking with them for nearly an entire hour. We did not have consent to record or transcribe this interview, but Ebuwa and Julian each took their own notes.
Here's what we learned...
Above is one iteration of the CLD we constructed based on E's responses. Let's talk through a couple of the loops...
Financial resources are one of many factors that dictate the type and quantity of food one can access. The more resources available, the better quality and larger quantity of food accessible.
The better the food quality and the more food child farmworkers have access to, the better their nutritional health will be.
The better their nutritional health is, the better their overall well-being will be. And the healthier farmworkers are, the more able to work and ergo earn money they will be.
Similarly, financial resources also had an effect on farmworkers' tolerance for unsafe working conditions. The less income a farmworker has, the more willing they might be to work under unsafe conditions in order to earn additional income.
There are safety guidelines that specify the elapsed time since spraying and distance from spraying one must follow to avoid the risk of pesticide poisoning. The greater tolerance one has to unsafe work conditions, the more likely they may choose to work in circumstances where pesticides are being sprayed nearby or not enough time has passed since spraying before returning to work.
As a result, the risk of pesticide exposure increases as farmworkers tolerate more unsafe working conditions.
The greater the risk for pesticide exposure, the more pesticide-related injuries and illness may occur.
Finally, the more pesticide-related injury and illness that occurs, the fewer farmworkers who are healthy and able to work.
0 comments