President Clinton and Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced Friday that, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) will be receiving the 2014 CGI Global Citizen Award, in recognition of the groundbreaking impact of the Fair Food Program.
Co-Founders, Lucas Benitez and Greg Asbed, Coalition of Immokalee Workers, along with other CIW representatives will travel to New York to attend the gala awards ceremony on September 21.
“This is a truly unexpected, and humbling, honor, said Benitez, in a statement. “This award is a wonderful recognition of the remarkable progress we have made as farmworkers, and the equally remarkable transformation that the Florida tomato industry has undergone as a whole, from one of the worst to quite possibly the best workplace in the US agricultural industry.”
Like Benitez, Asbed welcomed news of the 2014 CGI Global Citizen Award and issued the following statement:
“This award is truly going to tens of thousands of people, from our fellow CIW members who for over twenty years have refused to be treated as second class citizens, to the consumers who heeded their call and made their own voices heard in the streets and at checkout counters across the country, to the retail food corporations who took a chance on an unproven new model for Worker-driven Social Responsibility, and to the growers, who have taken so many courageous steps out of the bitter past and toward a more modern, more humane future for Florida agriculture.”
Other honorees include actor/philanthropist Leonardo DiCaprio and Atifete Jahjaga, President of the Republic of Kosovo.
