Erica Kohl-Arenas on the promise and perils of multi-stakeholder initiatives.

Most recently, the explicitly “win-win” or “double-bottom-line” model of addressing poverty while also producing a return on investments for private partners and the industry has been taken up by funders inspired by the union–grower alliance for immigration reform—as represented in the AgJOBS legislation¹ designed in an unprecedented compromise between farmworker advocates and major agricultural employers to address labor supply and the current immigration crisis. Despite worsening conditions for migrant field workers, many advocates believe that given the current climate of global financial crisis and competition, and the increasingly threatened status of undocumented workers, partnerships with growers to improve agricultural productivity are the only viable strategy for improving the lives of farmworkers. The rhetoric of farmworker advocates now includes saving California agriculture from the dangers of global competition and the need to ensure a sustainable workforce through new guest worker programs…. In this turn of events, self-help has taken a strange twist, with [farmworkers] responsible not only for themselves but for saving the industry….²

While unique and unprecedented cross-sector partnerships are emerging…much is kept off the table.

Excerpt from Erica Kohl-Arenas, The Self-Help Myth: How Philanthropy Fails to Alleviate Poverty, pp. 30 & 159. © 2016 Regents of the University of California. Reprinted with permission.