Alumna fights for farmworkers during pandemic

Imagine you are living in the middle of a global pandemic and—because you are part of an underserved minority group—you struggle to get health information, testing and even a vaccine.

This is a very real issue for Florida’s farmworkers. Luckily, they have an advocate in Lindsay McElroy.

A 2020 New College graduate who studied history, McElroy currently works as an executive administrative assistant for The Guatemalan-Maya Center in Lake Worth—a nonprofit organization that serves uprooted children and families in Palm Beach County.

“We have been advocating for farmworkers to be prioritized for the COVID-19 vaccine. Based on the CDC’s guidelines, farmworkers come after people in nursing homes and medical professionals because they are essential workers,” McElroy said. “We have been trying to make the vaccine accessible to them.”

Making vaccinations—and other critical resources—accessible to farmworkers is central to the philosophy behind the Center, which Father Frank O’Loughlin founded in 1992 after many Guatemalans fled their country during a mass genocide. McElroy volunteered at the Center prior to graduating from New College, hosting a summer camp there for indigenous children.

And this was just one part of her activism during her time at New College. For her undergraduate thesis, she researched the redlining system and how it affected the Black community in Miami in early 1900. Having been raised in the Coconut Grove neighborhood of the city, McElroy said the long shadow of discrimination against the Bahamian group is still noticeable, and she illuminated the problem in her research.

Her experience at New College, when she worked at the on-campus childcare center while she was a student, helped her learn how to run an after-school program (which is one of her responsibilities at the Center now). But her biggest undertaking is raising COVID-19 awareness within the community.

In addition to running the Center’s Instagram and Facebook pages, as well as the website, McElroy is in charge of sending out text and voice messages to community members. Because some of the people the Center serves are unable to read and write, McElroy makes messages in Mayan languages (in both video and audio formats).

“At the beginning of COVID-19, we started to send out voice messages in a variety of indigenous Mayan languages and Spanish every week—informing the community members about how to stay safe and how to stay distant from COVID,” McElroy said. “We have also been getting our community members tested. We held our own testing site every Saturday for seven months. And, since the vaccine was announced, we have been educating the community about why the vaccine is safe, what the vaccine is made of, and who should take the vaccine, so they can trust it.”

Luckily, McElroy’s efforts have had a hugely positive impact. Many people in the community have already contacted the Center, requesting the vaccine. This payoff has given McElroy a sense of purpose. And it is exactly the kind of work she set out to do when she was at New College.

As an undergraduate, she took several courses in international human rights law, as well as non-governmental organization advocacy classes at Hague University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands during a semester abroad.

“With New College, you get good guidance because it is a small school and you can work really closely with your professors. I feel like that guidance helped me on a professional level; it made me feel responsible,” McElroy said. “Also, in general, working in small classes and studying history, I was taught how to do research, and that accumulated in my thesis. That helped a lot with the Center because I write a lot of grants and do research for reports.”

McElroy values working for underrepresented communities, and she is just beginning this rewarding professional path. She ultimately plans to attend law school and continue serving society on a different level.

For more information on The Guatemalan-Maya Center, visit guatemalanmaya.org.

Yasi Bahmanabadi is an intern in the Office of Communications & Marketing.