The legal and illegal cannabis industry are flourishing in a number of states, driving a demand for migrant farm labor and causing new migration patterns. The serious federal immigration consequences of working in the growing or production of marijuana combined with emerging, undercapitalized, and/or criminal employers has created a perfect storm for abusive working conditions, including forced labor, violence and threats, substandard living conditions, and rampant wage theft. Last year, Oregon's Cannabis Worker Resilience Partnership - a holistic partnership of seven cross-sector non-profit organizations - formed to address the humanitarian crisis created by the abuses of the marijuana and hemp industry. Members of the Partnership will present on important considerations and emerging issues in immigration and employment law and the innovative partnership to address the unique needs of cannabis workers. We also will lead a discussion on potential collaboration and outreach to affected migrant communities across the country.

• Upon completion, participant will be able to identify common labor trafficking scenarios in the cannabis industry and resources available for workers.
• Upon completion, participant will be able to describe the immigration consequences of working in the marijuana industry and immigration relief available for victims of crime, trafficking and other labor abuses.
• Upon completion, participant will be able to identify the barriers to employment enforcement for workers in the cannabis industry and apply expansive theories of employer liability to cases.
• Upon completion, participant will be able to apply of employment and agricultural worker protection laws to cannabis workers and use best practices to protect some of our most vulnerable workers.

In this workshop, participants will discover practical strategies tailored for small teams aiming to engage effectively with agricultural workers. From understanding the unique needs of agricultural communities to leveraging digital tools for outreach, attendees will explore proven methods for building trust, fostering communication, and delivering impactful initiatives with a limited staff. Through interactive discussions and case studies, participants will gain actionable insights to enhance their outreach efforts and achieve meaningful connections with agricultural workers. This workshop offers invaluable guidance to empower your team and make a lasting impact in agricultural communities.

• Learn what works for a small team with a big coverage area and still make meaningful connections.
• Utilize all tools available to perform successful outreach to a very vulnerable population.
• Learn techniques to maximize limited outreach resources.
• Learn techniques to minimize outreach fatigue.

Outreach is an essential component of the work we do; it's flexibility and various styles of execution make it easily accessible to organizations looking to engage surrounding communities. This panel discussion and workshop will focus on best practices to ensure farmworkers and their needs remain at the core of outreach conversations. Participants will learn how to foster connections with Latinx farmworkers by identifying culturally relevant forms of communications to ensure meaningful participation during outreach. We will discuss ways to improve accessibility of outreach materials to address language barriers, varying literacy levels, and cultural differences. Participants will also learn how to connect and maintain partnerships with outside organizations to establish a strong network of diverse, relevant resources for their clients in the hopes of establishing a more inclusive outreach practice.

• Gain insight into why we, as advocates, conduct outreach and the importance of creating an inclusive environment.
• Demonstrate an understanding of strategies that can be used to establish trust among farmworkers and their families.
• Create outreach materials that take into consideration the diverse needs of farmworkers, whether it's varying levels of literacy, cultural backgrounds, or age.
• Build a resource network centered around the needs of farmworkers and collaborate with outside organizations to best serve the community.

This workshop will cover the basics of the agricultural overtime exemption, but will focus on the exemptions to the exemption - when farmworkers may actually be entitled to overtime. We will look at claims involving packinghouse workers, camp cooks, drivers, and more. There will be a focus on how to develop evidence to support your overtime claims.

• Describe the overtime exemption for farmworkers.
• Identify examples of situations where farmworkers may be entitled to overtime pay.
• Understand that eligibility for overtime is assessed on a workweek basis.
• Draft overtime claims for farmworkers, when appropriate.

This panel session will explore federal and state legal theories for permitting advocates to access farmworkers at employer-controlled housing and will provide examples of strategies for responding to access challenges. It will also examine recent and current litigation around camp access, including Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, Colorado Livestock Association v. Colorado, and potential legal challenges to the 2024 H-2A Rule. Lastly, the panel will discuss best outreach practices.

• Upon completion, participant will be able to describe the legal bases for camp access and strategize ways to respond to camp access challenges, assessing potential risks and benefits.
• Upon completion, participant will understand advocacy strategies and arguments that have been successful in stopping ag employers from weaponizing Supreme Court jurisprudence on private property rights to thwart camp access.
• Upon completion, participants will be able to create guidance focused on best practices and safety measures for conducting effective and secure outreach at farmworkers camps.

What data do programs use and collect, and for what ends?

• Upon completion, participant will be able to use farmworker data in outreach to farmworkers. Upon completion, participant will be able to understand how to use farmworker data in planning for outreach to farmworkers. Upon completion, participant will be able to understand how to use farmworker data in advocacy and community education. Upon completion, participant will be able to better understand trends in client communities.
• Assess the utility of your current data collection
• Upon completion, participant will be able to use farmworker data in outreach to farmworkers. Upon completion, participant will be able to understand how to use farmworker data in planning for outreach to farmworkers. Upon completion, participant will be able to understand how to use farmworker data in advocacy and community education. Upon completion, participant will be able to better understand trends in client communities.

Providing high quality direct legal services in a fast-paced environment can be challenging. This presentation aims to identify challenges specific to legal service providers working with immigrant and/or low-wage workers. We will discuss the following challenges and share ethical approaches to: managing expectations, meaningful language access, and respectful client storytelling. The second half of this training will focus on providing ethical advocacy in a way that is sustainable for the advocates themselves. We will explore what it means to support staff with lived experience, define moral injury, discuss what meaningful collaboration with colleagues looks like, and create intentional, safe spaces for staff to regularly discuss emotionally challenging cases.

• List specific strategies for managing expectations and incorporating language access in communications with prospective and current clients.
• Identify why staff with lived experience are an important part of ethical representation and learn about ways to support colleagues with lived experience.
• List strategies to share client stories ethically and respectfully.
• Define moral injury and consider its impact on direct service providers.

This is a follow-up to the November 2023 Zoom training on the RICO Act in Farmworker Cases. The first part of the workshop will be a brief review of the RICO basics we discussed in the 2023 training and more recent developments in the law (people who did not attend the 2023 training will get enough information during the review to participate meaningfully in this workshop). Most of the workshop will be practical: using a "ripped from the headlines" H-2A hypothetical, we will break up into small groups and develop an abbreviated fill-in-the-blank complaint incorporating best practices for (1) pleading RICO enterprises; (2) pleading a pattern of racketeering activity/continuity; (3) addressing potential causation issues; (4) addressing extraterritoriality and in pari delicto concerns: (5) and incorporating charts. Groups will then present their respective "complaints" to the participants. For each group complaint, we collectively will brainstorm about what works (and may not work). The goal is to come out of this workshop knowing enough concrete RICO skills (and related puns) to be dangerous. !Que RICO!

• understand the basics of civil RICO claims and the potential benefits and risks of including RICO claims in farmworker litigation.
• understand and correctly plead RICO enterprises and a pattern of racketeering activity, including continuity.
• avoid the pitfalls of causation, extraterritoriality, and in pari delicto.
• understand how to organize complex RICO allegations in a complaint (including use of charts) so they make sense and do not terrify the judge.

Across the United States, millions of farmworkers engage in difficult and skilled labor to put food on our tables.1 However, despite the essential labor they provide, they are not treated that way. Many farmworkers have incomes below the federal poverty level and struggle with housing insecurity, food insecurity, and lack of access to other critical resources and supports that influence health.2 These factors, also known as social determinants of health (SDOH), "are the conditions in the environments where people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks."3 Farmworkers are particularly impacted by the SDOH because of structural and systemic exclusion.4 Community-based farmworker clinics are essential resources for farmworkers to address health needs and access services. However, in order address and begin to rectify the environmental factors that are at the root of health and wellness issues, often legal intervention can be the missing piece. Legal service providers can be inaccessible to farmworkers. Strategic and embedded collaboration between medical and legal advocates in the form of a Medical-Legal Partnership (MLP) can be an invaluable tool for addressing SDOH and supporting farmworker families. MLPs are structural and integrated interventions, embedding lawyers into a healthcare setting to collaborate with the care team to address structural problems at the root of health inequities.5 Embedded lawyers work with the health care team to address individual patient's immediate social needs as well as to identify patterns and develop upstream strategies to address SDOH.6 MLPs can be an important tool to "improve outcomes for systemically and structurally excluded populations."7 In this session, participants will learn about a Farmworker MLP started two years ago by Central West Justice Center's Seasonal and Migrant Farmworker Unit in collaboration with "La Cliniquita" a farmworker clinic at the Baystate Brightwood Health Center in Springfield Massachusetts. This MLP is based on guidance from patients, community health workers, the workers center, and other community organizations. The partnership embeds a lawyer into the healthcare team to help patients with health harming legal needs, lead trainings for patients and providers, and advocate for policy change to eliminate systemic inequities at the state level. In this session we will share the model we have developed and explore the challenges, successes, and takeaways from our experience. Participants will engage in conversations about how embedding legal services within community-based farmworker medical clinics can help eliminate barriers for farmworkers and will leave with a model and key takeaways to help them think about how an MLP or similar partnership could be implemented in their own states and communities.

 Citations: 1) See Daniel Costa, How many farmworkers are employed in the United States, ECONOMIC POLICY INSTITUTE BLOG, (October 3, 2023), https://www.epi.org/blog/how-many-farmworkers-are-employed-in-the-united-states/. 2) See generally Sarah Goldman, et al., Essential and in Crisis: A Review of the Public Health Threats Facing Farmworkers in the U.S., JOHN HOPKINS CENTER FOR A LIVABLE FUTURE, (May 2021), https://clf.jhsph.edu/sites/default/files/2021-05/essential-and-in-_crisis-a-review-of-the-public-health-threats-facing-farmworkers-in-the-us.pdf. 3) U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, OFFICE OF DISEASE PREVENTION AND HEALTH PROMOTION, Healthy People 2030: Social Determinants of Health, https://health.gov/healthypeople/priority-areas/social-determinants-health, (last accessed May 29, 2024). 4) Goldman, supra note 2. 5) See generally NATIONAL CENTER FOR MEDICAL LEGAL PARTNERSHIPS, https://medical-legalpartnership.org/, (last accessed May 29, 2024). 6) Kate Marple, et al., Health Center MLP planning, implementation and practice guide: Bringing Lawyers onto the health center care team to promote patient & community health, NATIONAL CENTER FOR MEDICAL LEGAL PARTNERSHIPS (October 2020), at 5-7, https://medical-legalpartnership.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Health-Center-MLP-Toolkit-FINAL.pdf. 7) NATIONAL CENTER FOR MEDICAL LEGAL PARTNERSHIPS and Omar Martinez, Webinar Presentation, Best Practices for Screening and Data Collection for MLP's Serving Immigrant Populations: Advancing the Science of MLPs Serving Diverse Immigrant Populations, https://medical-legalpartnersh... (last accessed May 29, 2024).

• describe what a medical legal partnership (MLP) is and outline a model that an MLP can follow.
• describe the importance of taking the lead from patients, the care team, and community members when developing a partnership like an MLP, and/or when conducting more effective outreach.
• explain the social determinants of health that farmworkers face and reflect on the health harming needs that farmworkers in their own states and communities experience.
• design and implement an embedded community partnership, like an MLP, or improve upon one that is already in place based on the strategies shared among advocates during the session.

2024 promises to bring important changes in the regulatory framework affecting H-2A workers. In April 2024, the Department of Labor finalized the Farmworker Protection Rule, a sweeping effort to increase worker protections and strengthen DOL's enforcement capacity in the H-2A program. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security has proposed new rules for both the H-2A and H-2B programs which would offer workers greater flexibility and improve oversight of H-2 employers. While not addressing many structural flaws of our current temporary labor visa system, these developments represent an important advancement of workers rights in the H-2A program. This session will provide advocates with an overview of the relevant regulatory changes, their status as of the date of the conference, and their outlook in light of the next presidential administration. After developing that shared foundation among attendees, the workshop will shift to a discussion-based session where advocates will be invited to share what they are observing and hearing from workers regarding implementation of the new protections, and share strategies for ensuring the rules' effective implementation.

• At the end of this session, participants will have a firm grasp of the new regulatory changes affecting H-2A workers and their current status.
• At the end of this session, participants will be equipped to monitor the implementation of the new rules affecting H-2A workers in their own communities.
• At the end of this session, participants will have developed tools to ensure the enforcement of the new rules affecting H-2A workers.