Farmworkers Self-Help
Margarita Romo, Director
37240 Lock Street
Dade City, Fla. 33525
(904) 567-1432
(904) 567-1591 fax

It's not easy to place this excellent, innovative program into a single category, as its multiple efforts are the product of a quick responsiveness to community needs by a charismatic leader who inspires participants to take on whatever jobs need to be done.

You'll find strong community organizing elements here, but there's also a clinic, job training, AIDS/HIV and tuberculosis programs, a thrift shop and food pantry and much more, delivered in a non-sectarian but spiritual setting that teaches the value of dreaming great dreams.

Margarita Romo, once a Mexican-American migrant farmworker, later the wife of an American serviceman, then a displaced homemaker, sometimes a language teacher and often a community organizer, declares herself "a renegade" who "goes off like a rocket" when she gets a good idea, which happens often.

She won't take no for an answer, and it is largely through her efforts that FSH has grown from a one-woman operation to a club to a multi-purpose organization. It occupies a group of small buildings straddling the highway in dusty Dade City, an achingly poor orange-grove rural town with urban problems that range from grime to crime, graffiti and gangs and drugs, bad housing and poor schools and ethnic prejudice and all the other aches that poverty imparts.

By planning wisely and refusing to take "no" for an answer, Margarita Romo and her staff are starting to make a dent in those problems. She started by providing translation services, then one-on-one assistance to people having problems with the social-service bureaucracy. The group moved on to in-your-face advocacy for migrants against the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which led seamlessly into counseling, advice and advocacy for migrants eligible for the immigration "amnesty" during the 1980s. Now it has grown into a multiple-purpose organization serving many needs for a community of some 10,000 farm workers.

Much of the focus is on the young people of the community, for a simple reason: It's tough to be a Latino youngster in a farmworker community, to see your parents earning $2 for every bucket of tomatoes they pick and $6 for every tub of oranges -- pay rates unchanged in two decades -- and to realize that the only apparent alternatives to that lifestyle are unemployment or dealing drugs.

FSH tries to combat this attitude with the Teen Dream Team, a weekly meeting of esteem-building, mentoring, role modeling and just plain outspoken talk about what youngsters would REALLY like to do with their lives. The gains are small but measurable -- a young man who's now on the Dade City police force; another in the Navy; two young women in college. A scholarship fund that started with a $1,000 gift has somehow stretched through more small donations to provide $500 scholarships for eight community youngsters.

Among its many other activities are AIDS/HIV and TB education, using a creative team system in which a Latino, Anglo and a black worker go into the racially mixed community together; along with outreach and education, the group also provides weekly blood tests in a supportive and non-judgemental environment.

The group's complex of concrete-block houses, small but brightly painted and well-kept, also house organizing projects for farmworker women, teen mothers, low-cost housing advocacy and lobbying; computer training facilities, a plant nursery organized for job training, the thrift shop and food pantry, and a full-service medical clinic staffed by volunteers. Coming this summer, with the help of a $197,000 grant from Pasco County, is the Norma Learning Center, a much-needed day-care center.

Everyone on the staff of 11 earns at least $6 an hour except the director, who limits her salary to $626 a month because, she says, that's all she needs. The organization's lean budget varies depending on the generosity of funding sources, with income just over $100,000 in 1994.

"Paul said, 'Faith is the essence of things unseen but hoped for,'" Romo said. "This is slowly becoming a reality for us. We think we are a very great model. I say this with great pride because it has come through great sacrifice."

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.

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