How this Cal Poly student is helping farm workers’ children during COVID-19
Cecilia Guzmán Perez knows how hard it can be to ask for help — even when disaster strikes.
Her family home near Santa Rosa burned down in the devastating Tubbs Fire in 2017, while Guzmán was in her first year as a liberal studies major at Cal Poly.
“Even just asking for the basic necessity is a lot to ask for because you don’t want to ask for help, but you need it,” she said.
So, when the coronavirus pandemic hit and fires spread throughout California, Guzmán knew people would need assistance.
She was browsing social media, looking for ways she could help those in San Luis Obispo County, when she came upon a post from a farm worker asking for school supplies for their children.
“At first I was like, ‘I wish someone in SLO can do this,’ ” Guzmán said. “And I was just like, ‘Wait, you know what, I’m just gonna do it. I have the time. I’m just gonna do it.’ ”
On Aug. 23, Guzmán posted a simple note to her Instagram page on Sunday asking community members to meet her at Throop Park next to San Luis Obispo’s Pacheco Elementary School if they would like to donate school supplies to farm workers and their children.
The response, she said, was overwhelming.
“I didn’t think it was going to be this big,” Guzmán said. “I thought I was going to get a few, basic things for 10 students and that would be it.”
Instead, Guzmán began running out of space in the back of her pick-up truck. Then the trunk of the vehicle belonging to her partner, Cal Poly student Kaito Lopez, filled up.
Then donations began flooding in to her Venmo mobile payment account.
By Tuesday, Guzmán received more than $2,500 in her Venmo account from those who could not physically donate school supplies. Some of the monetary donations were given specifically to fund meals, buy gift cards or get groceries for farm workers, she said.
With the money and the donated school supplies, Guzmán filled 70 backpacks with paper, pens, pencils, calculators, headphones and other items for distance learning. When she ran out of backpacks, she filled Walmart shopping bags with supplies and stuffed supplies in binders to give to the farm workers and their kids.
“Farm workers are just always out there, having to do their job, even during pandemics or even during fires,” she said. “I wanted to do something to let them know that we appreciate them because they do feed us and I feel like a lot of them go under appreciated, even during a pandemic.”
On Tuesday, Guzmán met dozens of farm workers near Oceano to hand out the supplies. By the end of the day, she had run out of backpacks to give.
“They were all so excited and so grateful,” she said. “It went so well, so much better than I expected.”
Guzmán said she has about $200 left over in her Venmo account to buy more supplies for farm workers, which she plans to do later in the year.
“A few of the farm workers picked up two backpacks, but they have six grandkids at home,” she said. “They need more and I can get them more.”
Guzmán’s efforts sparked the interest of Gavin Schroter, a teacher at Central Coast New Tech High School in Nipomo, who offered to help continue giving school supplies to students..
“My school sent out questionnaires asking if students were in need of certain supplies, but I know that responding ‘yes’ to something like that can be uncomfortable or embarrassing for some of them,” Schroter wrote in an email to The Tribune. “By supporting someone in our community, I saw this as an alternative route to get supplies to these kids.”
Schroter said Lucia Mar Unified School District has funds set aside for students who need school supplies,” he wrote. “All families need to do is contact their school office and “we’ll do the best we can to get supplies to them.”
“Farm work is the backbone of the Central Coast and while it may not be evident in the less agricultural areas of the coast, we rely so much on the hard work of these individuals to have access to fresh, local food,” Schroter wrote. “Unfortunately in our society, these farm workers are easily overlooked or forgotten.
“We take their work for granted and rarely do we stop to thank them and lift them up. We stop to thank doctors, nurses and first responders as essential workers during this pandemic — why not our farm workers too?”
To help gather donations for farm workers, email Cecilia Guzmán Perez at cguzma20@calpoly.edu.
