Dolores Huerta, president and founder of the Dolores Huerta Foundation and co-founder of the United Farm Workers of America, will present the opening keynote at the 2018 AAA Annual Meeting in San Jose.
Huerta is a labor leader and community organizer. She has worked civil rights and social justice for over 50 years. In 1962 she and Cesar Chavez founded the United Farm Workers union where she served as vice president and played a critical role in many of the union’s accomplishments for four decades. In 2002 she received the Puffin/Nation $100,000 prize for Creative Citizenship which she used to establish the Dolores Huerta Foundation (DHF). DHF is connecting groundbreaking community-based organizing to state and national movements so that they can:
- register and educate voters
- advocate for education reform
- bring about infrastructure improvements in low-income communities
- advocate for greater equality for the LGBT community
- and create strong leadership development
She has received numerous awards including the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award from President Clinton in 1998 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama in 2012.
