Legal Education Fellowship for ESL Farmer Leaders in the Northeast Region

Commodities

Practices

• Farm Business Management: business planning, risk management, other
• Sustainable Communities: leadership development, quality of life

Agriculture service providers have enormous capability to deliver timely, effective, and accurate legal education that prevents farm legal problems - despite the fact that they aren’t attorneys. Our proven model for training agricultural educator to teach farm law is in demand in the Northeast region. But at the same time, we need to adapt our existing model to better serve the unique needs of English as a Second Language (ESL) and New American (immigrant, refugee, and asylum seeking, shortened to NA) producers. These producers have just as much, if not more, need for quality legal education that guides them through the United States’ framework.

Simply translating or interpreting existing curricula intended for English speakers isn’t working. ESL and NA farm audiences need curriculum that provides robust explanation of common US legal concepts, that isn’t dependent on literacy levels, and that enables accurate, localized translation and interpretation into a wide variety of languages. Also, legal education for ESL and NA farmers shouldn’t sacrifice any of the leadership development and empowerment that US-born English speaking farmers experience when they learn how to resolve legal risk.

We can do this. We will adapt our existing and successful training program to effectively empower ESL and NA farm audiences. The Advisory Committee will help us do this by assisting us in identifying the concepts that need elaboration, providing a trauma-informed perspective, recommending non-literacy-driven mechanisms of teaching, and selecting words for the glossary. The project team will use this input to create a set of 5 presentations with slide decks and scripts, a teacher’s manual, activities, and handouts that teach the basics of business structures, insurance/liability, employment law, farm leasing, and farm diversification. These materials will be geared for low to no-literacy audiences and for interpretation/translation into a wide variety of languages. Selected glossaries in Spanish, Kinyarwanda, and Mayan will be prepared, with other languages developed on an ongoing basis in communities.

Then, we will recruit and train 8 agriculture service providers (called Fellows) to deliver this material in their own communities. Our 6-session training program builds confidence and identifies the exact bounds of legal education (rather than legal services). By providing robust and ongoing support as Fellows deploy the curriculum, we will see 80 ESL and NA farmers take essential steps to reduce legal risk. Most Fellows will choose to translate the material themselves and deliver it in the audience’s native language while others need to use simultaneous translation. Both will be supported. In addition, Fellows will use peer to peer learning techniques and leadership development to support their community’s legal resilience journey.

Eight agricultural service providers from within non-English speaking farming communities in the Northeast will deliver at least one and up to 5 select farm law presentations in their community’s first language, regardless of the audience’s level of literacy. Each presentation will reach at least 10 English as a Second Language or New American (ESL or NA) farmers during the term of the project for a total of 80 farmers served.

The 8 ag service providers we train will have the knowledge and confidence deliver our effective, community-focused curriculum without overstepping legal bounds. Our intensive 6-session Legal Education Fellowship (Fellowship, for short) gives our 8 ag professionals (Fellows, for short) the training they need. We provide robust support to Fellows in delivering the selected presentations including networking to others around the country who are delivering the same material in their communities after the project ends. This also means at least 80 ESL or NA farmers will understand and be prepared to implement best practices for legal resilience, regardless of: the language they speak, their familiarity with US legal business conventions, or their literacy level. (No specific farmer performance target due to challenges collecting/analyzing data in a low/no literacy environment.)