One million surgical masks for the farmworkers who pick California’s crops came from Bank of America this month, and 200,000 of them are destined for Santa Barbara County. The donation to California’s Office of Emergency Services was earmarked for essential fieldworkers, whose cases of COVID-19 spiked dramatically in Santa Barbara County in July, largely in the Santa Maria area.
A heavy effort by Public Health, the Family Services Agency, and word-of-mouth outreach campaigns by groups like the Mixteco Indigena Community Organizing Project (MICOP) succeeded in bringing the spikes from a high of 70-plus cases down to a case rate in the 20s by October. The Family Service Agency also runs the Housing for the Harvest program, which houses sick or exposed people in motel rooms and provides meals, wellness checks, and transportation so that the individuals can avoid exposing their families or roommates to coronavirus.
Recognizing MICOP’s successful education program on viral spread, Bank of America gave another 20,000 masks to MICOP alone. Vice Chair Thong Nguyen said the bank had “a responsibility to help protect the most vulnerable members of our community in these challenging times,” stating that agricultural workers have been hit harder than most others by the pandemic. The million masks also went to the counties of Ventura, Fresno, Imperial, and San Diego.