iEat Green - Leonel Perez & Nico Page Student Farmworkers Alliance and Coalition of the Immokalee Workers

Nico Page is Chilean-American and grew up both in Chile and the U.S. As a high schooler in Chile, he got involved with student protests making videos and large-scale art and fell in love with organizing. Now a junior studying Literary Arts at Brown University in Providence, RI, he became involved with the Campaign for Fair Food during the Coalition of Immokalee Workers' March 2018 major action in New York City. He is taking a semester-long leave from Brown to intern with the Alliance for Fair Food in Immokalee, Fl, where he collaborates on student actions, makes videos, supports the community and is learning from the Coalition’s long history of organizing. 

Leonel Perez has been a key leader of the award-winning human rights organization, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), for over a decade.  Mr. Perez worked for years in the fields of Florida and along the East Coast harvesting tomatoes, watermelon, and other crops.  Today, as a part of the Fair Food Program, Mr. Perez and his colleagues educate tens of thousands of farmworkers’ on their rights in the fields on all farms participating in the Program, including the right to work free of slavery, sexual violence, and health and safety risks.

Mr. Perez also hosts shows on the CIW's community radio station and community communications, and throughout the year facilitates and conducts dozens of popular education trainings for weekly membership meetings.  Finally, Ms. Perez represents the CIW at a national level, speaking publicly on the challenges faced by farmworkers in Florida, both during major actions with thousands of consumers and in dozens of presentations throughout the year.  He has been featured in publications such as CNN’s Freedom Project and best-selling books such as Tomatoland (2017) and I am not a tractor (2018).