The experience, Lyon says, was inspiring and motivating. The conference is three days of presentations, panel discussions, and training sessions for the nonprofits and attorneys, paralegals, and outreach and administrative staff of non-profit legal aid organizations who provide legal aid to migrant and seasonal farmworkers. Vamos Outreach is a tool designed specifically for farmworker organizations to plan, track, and report on outreach to migrant labor camps.
Farmworkers are some of the most vulnerable workers in the nation, facing poor wages as well as dangerous housing and health conditions. However, because workers live in such rural and isolated areas, they can be very difficult to locate. Organizations spend a lot of valuable staff resources cobbling together spreadsheets, maps, and memories to put together outreach plans. Currently in use by 17 organizations in 14 states, Vamos provides a customizable repository for outreach maps, routes, notes, photos, and other information essential to the outreach workers providing support to migrant farmworkers.
This year, those partner organizations used Vamos to conduct 10, worker interactions during 1, outreach visits to 1, camps. These visits — and the casework that follows — can ultimately lead to improvements in farmworker living and working conditions. Santa shared that Legal Aid of Nebraska had used Vamos to track complaints about workers who were brought to the US to work for weeks, then taken back to Mexico without ever being paid. That is only one example of the type of situation for which a farmworker might require legal aid, Lyon says.
I love making tools that people love to use — but I love even more the idea that software can help people feel seen. Vamos helps organizations plan, document, and report on their outreach efforts, helping outreach groups with a set of needs that is very specific to their work. To be able to make this software for the farmworker advocacy community — and to be surrounded by the people who use, or could use, this app, and to hear their excitement about it — was a really positive experience.
Another important aspect of the conference was meeting our Vamos partners in person, Lyon says. We were working together to move historical outreach data from their spreadsheet into the Vamos database.
