Learn more about our staff, and don’t hesitate to get in touch!
Ana Beltran, Outreach Worker
Phone: 919-625-0209
Ana Beltran is part of the outreach team at the NC Farmworkers Project in Benson, conducting outreach to farmworkers and offering them education on different health topics, referring them to low-cost medical clinics if they need it. This is the second year that Ana has worked as a Certified Application Counselor for ACA at the Farmworkers’ Project, helping farmworkers obtain insurance coverage through the Marketplace in their own language. Ana enjoys visiting farmworker camps and offering the Projects’ resources, since this organization and its team always seek the well-being of farmworkers in North Carolina. She equally enjoys listening to farmworkers tell their stories and experiences during their stay in North Carolina, and hearing with what respect and love they talk about their families and all they are capable of doing for them. Ana has great admiration and respect for farmworkers.
Ana has done the work of an outreach worker for many years, beginning as a volunteer in 2002 bringing health education to farmworkers and families in NC. Ana has remained in constant communication with farmworkers, creating a close and trusting relationship with them. The development of her skills as an outreach worker has been one of Ana’s greatest passions, one that she carries out with love and respect. She says “When you love and enjoy your work, it isn’t work” - what more can you ask for?
Balbina Cerro, Outreach Worker
Phone: 919-623-8370
Email: balbinacerro06@gmail.com
Balbina has been an outreach worker with the NC Farmworkers’ Project since 2015. She is responsible for outreach in Wake County and organizes much of our work with seasonal farmworker families. Balbina has extensive past experience as a community educator, including working with March of Dimes and working as a promotora with El Pueblo, and she volunteers regularly at her church.
Gabriela Elvir (Vicky), Outreach Worker
Phone: 919-915-2209
Email: vicky@ncfwp.org
Gabriela Elvir finished her high school and some college studies in her native country of Honduras. She began working at the NC Farmworkers’ Project as an AmeriCorps volunteer, training farmworkers in health education topics of pesticide safety and heat illness. In December 2012 she graduated as a Safe AmeriCorps. Afterwards, she began work at the Farmworkers’ Project as an outreach worker in 2013. She is a happy community educator, offering health information to farmworkers and their families that we visit year after year. Her efforts are spent in visiting area camps and families to bring them clinic services, education about chronic diseases, transportation services, and interpretation with different health providers. One of her favorite things in visiting camps and families is being able to share a pleasant moment, fun anecdotes, singing, and eating. She always tries to make visits not boring but enjoyable and entertaining for everyone. As part of her responsibilities, Gabriela is in charge of medical charts, medicines for the mobile unit, health education and patient chronic diseases. She believes her work is beautiful, and is very happy to be a part of the NC Farmworkers’ Project, who she considers her second family. Her objective is to help the most in need and everything she does she does with all her strength and her whole heart.
Janeth Tapia, Outreach Coordinator
Phone: 919-915-2220
Email: janeth@ncfwp.org
Janeth began working with the Farmworkers’ Project as a promotora in 2000. Since then, she has worked on a number of different projects, including promotores projects, research projects with Wake Forest University, and health education. For the last 13 years, she has served as the Outreach Coordinator with the health program. She coordinates visits to farmworker camps and maintains the Project’s connection with groups of volunteers, clinics, and students who help us carry out our work each year, and mentors and leads the Project's team of outreach workers. An expert in motivating the community, Janeth has overseen the enormous growth of the health program in her time at the Farmworkers’ Project --from serving 130 workers in its first year to more than 2500 last year. In her free time, she likes to take pictures and to spend time with her husband.
Maria Elena Mejia, Outreach Worker
Phone: 919-915-9991
Email: maria@ncfwp.org
Maria Mejia grew up in Honduras, where she also studied. She has worked with the Farmworkers’ Project as an outreach worker since 2010, and now is a trusted source of information and resources for farmworkers in the area. She brings a passion for justice to all of her work. Maria coordinates the summer clinics for farmworkers and many farmworker specialist appointments. In her free time, Maria loves to exercise, travel to the beach, and spend time with her family.
Neissly Tapia, ACA Outreach Worker
Phone: 910-891-8254
Email: neissly@ncfwp.org
Neissly Tapia is originally from Chihuahua, Mexico, in the beautiful Tarahumara mountains. She is the youngest of nine children born to Jose and Maria Tapia. When she was 15, she came to this beautiful country, and experienced a range of different emotions. Although she had lived her whole life in different places in northern Mexico because her parents were missionaries, now she experienced a different set of barriers like learning to live in a new culture with a different language.
In spite of adversity, with the help of her family and high school teachers, she was able to conquer fear and break the language barrier. Through the years, she has discovered that serving the community is her passion, especially the migrant community, because she has experienced their fears and needs herself.
Now that she is part of the Farmworkers’ Project, she has the opportunity to serve the farmworker community in different ways, like providing information about the Affordable Care Act, and, when possible, helping farmworkers to enroll in health insurance. She also provides assistance and information to farmworkers to help them maintain their health insurance. At the end of the season, she helps workers cancel their policies.
Anna Jensen, Executive Director
Phone: 919-915-9990
Email: annaj@ncfwp.org
Anna Jensen first came to work for the Farmworkers’ Project in 2008 as an outreach worker fresh out of college. In the two years she served as an outreach worker with the health program before returning to grad school, she learned more Spanish than in her four years of undergrad and developed an unexpected love for the flat fields of Eastern North Carolina. After completing her graduate studies in Community Development in California, she couldn’t stay away from the state where she grew up and from the organization that put her in touch with so many of North Carolina’s diverse residents. She has been the Executive Director of the Project since 2014, and she is constantly grateful for the dedicated, smart and fierce staff members with whom she has the privilege of working, and for the farmworkers who make this work worth doing. When not working, she can be found experimenting with baking projects (favorite recipe this year: molten chocolate cake), knitting, running, taking pictures of her cat, and experiencing North Carolina’s natural beauty on as many hikes as possible.
Leonardo Galvan, Outreach Worker and Community Educator
Phone: 919-915-2232
Leonardo Galvan currently works as an outreach worker in the health program, where he leads a promotores program with farmworkers, inviting workers themselves to be lay health leaders among their peers. Before serving in this capacity at the Project, for 13 years he conducted research projects with Wake Forest University, where he gained experience in research around pesticides and farmworker living conditions. In his free time, Leonardo is director of his church choir and volunteers transporting workers so that they can attend mass.
Leonardo has been a farmworker himself since the age of eight, growing cotton, beans, corn, melons, watermelons, and pumpkins in his parents’ fields. He did his high school studies in Mexico, where he obtained a certificate of [agricultural techniques?]. Afterwards he began studying agronomy in the university, but could not finish his studies there for lack of economic resources. He then saw the necessity of coming to the United States. He was a farmworker in the US for 10 years before becoming involved with the NC Farmworkers’ Project. He worked for different farmers in Virginia, Florida, and North Carolina, in several different crops. In doing this, he gained insight into farmworkers’ lives, and he remains involved in the activities and needs of farmworkers, helping them to confront different barriers that they face.