SWFL

Rachel Iacovone is a former student at Florida Gulf Coast University who majored in journalism. For her senior capstone project, Iacovone and her teammates tackled issues surrounding farmworkers in Immokalee, Florida and provided voices for the voiceless.

 

Rachel shares with our reporter, Ariel, what it was like working with her teammates to help farmworkers find their voices.

 

Ariel: “How did you come across your senior capstone project and why did you decide to do it?”

 

Rachel: “I've always been acutely aware of the needs of Immokalee, having grown up in an area of North Naples that put me 30 minutes away from the multi-million dollar mansions downtown and 30 minutes from the fields where Immokalee residents picked the produce that ended up in the fridges of those beach homes. I'm not in the business of advocacy as a journalist, but giving the community an equal amount of airtime -- a seat at the table -- whatever you want to call it felt fair. It felt like, and I believe my group would agree, we were giving them the fairness that should have always been afforded to them.

 

Ariel: “Who were your teammates and what was everyone’s individual tasks and roles?”

 

Rachel: “Allie Taylor was a contributing writer, who created content like a Storify of live tweets from a Coalition of Immokalee Workers rally, a photo-rich profile on an FGCU student who did her arts capstone on Immokalee at the same time and a feature on the first Immokalee High School student to go to Harvard.”

 

“Vanessa Rivera was managing editor. She was great about keeping us all organized and on a task in the minute details of my big-picture ideas. Her work differed from the rest of us in that she came into our group as the president and founder of the Network of Enlightened Women chapter on campus. Having strong political beliefs and a responsibility to represent NeW, which is a conservative women's group, Vanessa did a great job of balancing the topic with her political advocacy by producing a personal audio piece about her grandmother's recent path to U.S. citizenship for example or her op-ed on FGCU considering becoming a sanctuary campus at the time.”

 

“Joseph Lyshon was our video editor, which meant the two of us worked together the most. Whenever I had an idea for a story, Joe would say something along the lines of "So, how can I help you (and be there with a camera)?" All of the videos you see on the Sowing the Seeds of Change site were shot and edited by him, typically with a combined effort in the quotes we'd choose and the actual script writing for me to voice over the video. Joe did, completely on his own, go cover the Planned Parenthood in Immokalee, which would have been the first center in the network to close in Southwest Florida if the proposed cuts to Planned Parenthood had gone through. Joe did not let the language barrier, his gender, the sensitivity of the subject or the fact that they wouldn't let him record video in the building deter him. It ended up being a written article.”

 

“Finally, I was the executive editor of our project and mainly existed to guide my teammates through a topic and town they weren't familiar with much or at all. I kind of threw every idea I had at them, and then, we all individually ran with whatever stuck with us. Besides the video packages I created with Joe, I did a two-way interview with an immigration specialist from a similar town to Immokalee in California. I created audio comparison piece between two graduates of Immokalee High School -- one who dropped out a decade ago when the graduation rate was the 60-something percent and the other who almost dropped out when the rate was still in the 80s. They were now enrolled in the same nursing program at Immokalee Technical College, across the street from Immokalee High, which boasts a graduation rate over 90 percent now and was about to send off its first Harvard-bound grad. I kept up with that story after capstone actually, with WGCU, and I just won the second place Florida Associated Press Broadcasters award for it in the Feature | Cultural/Historical category.”

 

Ariel: “What challenges did you and your teammates face when tackling this project?”

 

Rachel: “Besides the concerns of ‘who will even be willing to talk to us?’or ‘what if they don't give us the records we requested?’ etc., we mainly faced the issue of bridging the knowledge gap of the community. I knew so much, and my team members knew so little coming into it. And, then, here I was asking them to throw away their biases -- which, sure, we're always supposed to do as journalists, but immigration is a contentious subject matter, and I'd be lying if I said every journalist is completely unbiased on the topic, one way or the other. I think the facts are what helped us overcome this. The more my group knew, the more they could draw their own opinions about the community. Or, in Joe's case, the more he saw. I can distinctly remember pulling out of Immokalee the first time the two of us went out there together, and he looked over at me and casually said, "It reminds me of back home." Joe's from Fort Pierce, which is blue collar in a different way, but I was admittedly stunned he'd come to that conclusion so fast, seeing past the different language on all the signs, the color of a lot of the residents' skin. Immokalee was just another hard-working, small town in America. That was the fact of the matter.”

 

Ariel: “Do you feel as if you helped Collier County to have a voice for immigrants?”

 

Rachel: “Absolutely. We gave a voice to the voiceless. That was the plan all along. Whether we agreed with their message or not, their message deserved the same amount of circulation as any other in town, right? Who gave the other side of Collier County the sole rights to the media, to the lawmakers, to anything really? It wasn't our job to tell our audience whether this or that person from Immokalee was good or bad for this or that reason. It was our job to tell Collier and the rest of Southwest Florida, though, about this person and this community and let them draw their own conclusions, as we had.”

 

Ariel: “If you could change something about your project, what would it be?”

Rachel: “I often wish I could go back to the start of it and light the fire I saw in everyone on my team by the end. We could've done even more than the already great work we did accomplish. I just wish we'd made the very most of every minute. Capstone is here and gone in a flash, and you may follow up with it for some time. But, for the most part, your message is at its loudest for one semester and one semester only.”