FLAN

North Carolina’s farmworkers often face many barriers to accessing services, barriers that simultaneously affect the ability of advocates and service providers to reach them. Farmworkers often live in very isolated areas and often have little to no contact with anyone other than the crew of workers with whom they live and work. Most farmworkers in NC live in migrant labor camps that are provided by the employer in rural, hard-to-reach areas.

The Farmworker Advocacy Network’s (FAN) Farm Labor Address Network (FLAN) is a secure database that will collect and maintain high-priority information related to the location and profile of labor camps throughout North Carolina. The information in the database will be maintained by FAN users who rely most heavily on this information for effective service delivery and advocacy. The database is designed to facilitate the existing workflows of FAN users and provide them with the information which will be most helpful in their respective work.

Research Action Design partnered with the Farmworker Advocacy Network (FAN) to develop the first ever statewide database of formal & informal farm labor camps in order to facilitate collaboration among advocates, break the isolation experienced by migrant farmworkers, and link isolated farmworkers to healthcare and other services in rural communities of North Carolina.

In 2021, RAD worked with FAN on a series of major usability enhancements for FLAN that had been requested by farmworker advocates, including enabling offline access to the database and associated maps in areas with low internet connectivity.