SFA: In our own words...

by Brian Payne, former SFA staff member

Before meeting the CIW I was damn good at complaining about the problems in the world and how shitty things were, but I never got involved in changing those things. While I appreciated reading about movements throughout the world, and reveled in the protests in Seattle, I never realized that I could do anything myself — in fact, the times that I tried to get involved I was quite frankly turned off by the do-good attitude of “activists” who were planning on resolving the problems of the poor.

In 2000 I joined the CIW’s March for Dignity, Dialogue and a Living Wage to do research about social movements, and was blown away. Here was a group of workers who had everything against them and were “unorganizable”, and they were standing up, fighting and making real change – and me, a white male in grad school with all the privilege in the world and I was doing nothing. During the march, I met several students from schools around Florida and we joked about forming a student solidarity group, maybe some sort of student-farmworker alliance. I moved down to Immokalee shortly after the march, and tripped and stumbled over myself trying to figure out what solidarity is and how best to support the movement. I made a lot of dumb mistakes and learned tons about organizing from the workers, and eventually, after a year of conversations with other students from around the state, we decided to take ourselves seriously and called ourselves the Student/Farmworker Alliance (SFA).

My experience with the CIW and SFA changed my understanding of the world – now I view myself as an active participant in history rather than a passive recipient of other people’s history. I’ve seen the same transformation take place in the lives of hundreds of students and youth around the country because of this movement. There’s a certain brilliance that you can see and feel in people’s eyes and smiles after they have participated in their first (and second, and third, and every consecutive) action, knowing that things can and do change – I have become addicted to that feeling.

After about four and a half years, now 30-something, I decided that it was getting tough to pretend to be a student anymore, so I decided to move on to create the space for others to take on leadership roles. I moved to the Twin Cities and now work at a workers’ center with the Workers’ Interfaith Network (WIN). I still look at the world and see a lot of screwed-up things – in the midst of this economic crisis where hundreds of thousands of people are losing their jobs, homes and everything, Goldman Sachs is giving out the largest bonuses they have ever given in history… But I know that things can be different if we organize, and if we truly live solidarity.

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