Farm Labor Leader Wins Catholic Award
Lucas Benitez, a 22-year-old farm worker organizer, is the first winner of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development’s Cardinal Bernardin New Leadership Award.
Benitez, a community organizer at the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Immokalee, Fla., emigrated from Mexico as a teenager and began picking fruit in the South and along the East Coast. He became active in the Southwest Florida Farmworker Project, funded by the Catholic Campaign for Human Development.
He helped lead a local campaign to raise the federal minimum wage and was a leader of the first general strike in Immokalee to protest a planned wage cut.
The campaign, founded in 1979 by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, is a leading supporter of anti-poverty projects.
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