Disparate Power and Disparate Resources: Collaboration Between Faith‐based and Activist Organizations for Central Florida Farmworkers

This article highlights the collaboration between an evangelical faith‐based organization and secular activist organization to address the oral health needs of African American former farmworkers in Central Florida. Highlighting the FBO's evangelistic agenda, I discuss one FBO as a charitable health care provider filling a service gap within the broader health care system. In addition, I discuss the organizations’ different levels of access to powerful agents of change, and the role of the anthropologist as an intermediary between the FBO and secular organization. This article first details the health concerns of the former farmworker population in Central Florida as they relate to farm labor and living in an environmentally harmful area. It then sheds light on systematic health care constraints in the United States that necessitate intervention from faith‐based organizations and secular activist organizations. Last, this article provides a case study of how an anthropologist, acting as an intermediary to connect a faith‐based group with an activist group, helped address one specific health need for former migrant farmworkers.