From Exploitation to Empowerment

Kerry Kennedy - Is Your Food Grown by Oppressed Farmworkers? | Brought to you by Thrive Market, Athletic Greens, and Theragun

Social injustice is all around us. With the age of COVID-19, we see it in the higher rates of illness in our most underserved communities. On a larger, everyday scale we see it in the exploitation of farmworkers we all rely on to produce our food. Of course, these are only two examples of many human rights issues that we all should be thinking about. We often make a mistake in thinking we’re too insignificant to help. We’re not politicians, lobbyists, philanthropists, so what could we possibly do? The answer is a lot—with each small step of activism we take, we send positive ripples out into our communities and the rest of the world. I was so excited to sit down with my good friend Kerry Kennedy to talk about human rights activism and how her family has historically been a part of producing positive social change. 

Kerry is the president of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights. Since 1981, she has worked on diverse human rights issues including child labor, disappearances, indigenous land rights, judicial independence, freedom of expression, ethnic violence, impunity, women's rights, and the environment. Kerry is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Being Catholic Now, Robert F. Kennedy: Ripples of Hope, and Speak Truth to Power: Human Rights Defenders Who Are Changing Our World. Kerry founded RFK Compass, which convenes biannual meetings of institutional investors who collectively control $5 to $7 trillion in assets to address the impact of human rights violations on investment outcomes. She serves on the boards of the U.S. Institute of Peace, Human Rights First, Ethics in Action, SDG USA, Sustainable Development Goals Center for Africa, Health eVillages, Kailash Satyarthi Children's Foundation, Nizami Ganjavi International Center as well as several public companies. 

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Here are more of the details from our interview: 

• Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s social justice work and how it influenced Kerry’s human rights work (7:06)

• Exploitation of food and farm workers in the U.S. and New York state (17:51)

• How Black people were intentionally excluded from the Fair Labor legislation passed by President Roosevelt (23:34)

• The importance of allowing collective bargaining among farm workers (26:10)

• The Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ work preventing exploitation of farm workers and how their model is being replicated around the world (30:15)

• The Fair Food Program and how it’s different from most social responsibility compacts (36:59)

• Health, economic, and human rights inequities in the United States (40:24)

• The silver linings of the coronavirus pandemic (43:27)

• RFK’s moral imagination, his role in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the speech he gave on the night of MLK Jr.’s assassination (48:56)

• Social emotional learning (57:58)

Learn more about Kerry’s work at RFK Human Rights at https://rfkhumanrights.org/ and follow her on Facebook @KerryKennedyRFK and on Twitter @KerryKennedyRFK

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