Our Work

Rooted in community.

DC Fair Food was started in 2010 by Georgetown University students committed to food justice. They were organizing in solidarity with the Coalition of Immokalee Worker’s farmworker-led movement (see below) as members of the Student / Farmworker Alliance. DC Fair Food has since evolved into a community-powered collective, bringing together students and community members throughout Washington DC.

You can find DC Fair Food members tabling at the Mount Pleasant Farmers Market on Saturdays from 10am-1pm. We’re best known for our cute “dad hats” and telling people to boycott Wendy’s. The funds that we raise from selling our hats, t-shirts, and tote bags is partly used to support the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and partly redistributed to local community and mutual aid groups.

We partner most closely with the Happy Hour Fund, a grassroots mutual aid fund that began during the pandemic to provide financial assistance and other necessities to excluded workers in DC and LA.

Part of a national movement.

DC Fair Food is one chapter of a national network organizing in solidarity with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a worker-led human rights organization that is transforming conditions for farmworkers across the United States.

Immokalee is a small, rural community in southwest Florida. Why should you care, and why do we care so deeply about this work in Washington DC?  The CIW’s national organizing exists at the intersection of several movements: food and racial justice, immigrant rights, the rights of labor, and more. It’s about advancing a sustainable system for disenfranchised people and the planet, and everyone has a role to play as allies. 

The Campaign for Fair Food advances the CIW’s Fair Food Program (FFP) as a uniquely proven vehicle to achieve these goals. The FFP has brought 14 of the largest U.S. food companies –including McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway, Taco Bell, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe’s – into a legally-binding agreement to ethnically source their produce, primarily tomatoes.

That means any farms that sell their produce to a participating corporation must comply by a labor code of conduct created by farmworkers to double their wages and protect against the worst abuses in the fields – including sexual assault, wage theft, heat illness, and more. In its 10 years, the FFP has drastically reduced these manifestations of exploitation in the supply chains of participating companies.

Wendy’s is the last major fast food chain yet to join the FFP. That is why we tell people to Boycott Wendy’s for farmworker justice. The boycott is one tool to build public pressure until the company decides to join its competitors and stand on the right side of history.

Our struggles are not the same, but they converge.