As you may already know, there are many barriers to entry for farm workers trying to connect with service organizations.

They may have to create and manage several accounts. They may have to answer the same questions multiple times on different forms. They worry about how their data will be used. They may have to go to a physical office to process paperwork, cutting into their work time.

As a result of all these complications, organizations struggle to collect and validate farm worker information — which often impacts how much funding they will receive.

Preparese aims to change all that, digitizing social impact services to serve more farm workers, reduce administrative complexity, and achieve a higher level of trust and transparency within their communities.

In this post, we’ll explain how Preparese works, who it benefits, and its potential to reinvent the way organizations serve the farm workers.

How Does Preparese Work?

Preparese provides an online digital identity to farm workers in a way that is not available on the internet right now.

Today, our digital identities are effectively an endless count of logins and passwords to hundreds of websites — all of which are comprised of repetitive and tedious forms onto which users overshare data for the benefit of the company holding their account. Beyond bad user experiences, this setup compromises security and privacy.

Preparese overcomes these challenges with high-tech digital credentials akin to the physical credentials we use today: birth certificates, driver's licenses, passports, and credit cards. Just as we participate or transact in the physical world by presenting one or more of these credentials, digital credentials can be used by farm workers to participate in service programs online.

Who Benefits From Preparese?

Farm workers communities stand to benefit most from Preparese because it brings life-saving services to their fingertips. With an intuitive, simple app, they no longer have to:

• Give up time away from work, school, or family
• Wait in long lines
• Settle for an inconvenient appointment
• Struggle with finding transportation, parking, or directions to an event
• Fill out long registration forms by hand
• Carry around sensitive paperwork that could be lost or stolen
• Wait for someone to update you on the status of your application
• Remember all the required deadlines. 

Preparese empowers them to take charge of their journey, wherever and whenever is convenient for them — while still offering one-to-one resources whenever necessary.

Service organizations

Preparese brings farm worker service organizations’ vision of a digital community to life without breaking the bank or putting undue stress on your existing staff. By digitizing highly manual workflows and enabling farm workers to self-serve, employees can focus their attention on more strategic tasks or complicated cases that require a more hands-on approach.

Donors

Donors want to know their money is making a difference. Preparese enables social impact organizations to:

• Handle ever-changing situations with new technologies and new approaches to member service
• Move toward long-term financial sustainability
• Showcase their primary strategic objectives
• Demonstrate their impact on the community

With these hard facts readily available, they’ll know organizations they fund are organizations they can trust.

Developers

The internet was built without a digital identity layer, and it’s ruining the customer experience. 

We have too many accounts to create and manage. Our data is over-collected and over-shared. We are persistently tracked and correlated. Our data is siloed and not interoperable in the places we want it to be. Data verification is too slow.

Preparese is addressing all of these oversights with a decentralized digital identity model built on the principles of self-sovereign identity (SSI). People, organizations, and objects will own, manage, and control their digital credentials — just like their physical ones.

It’s an emerging technology rapidly heading towards interoperable and non-proprietary protocols, and it presents a massive greenfield opportunity for developers to contribute to its adoption.

Pique your interest? Join our community and do something good with technology.

Powering Nationwide Farmworker Relief Program: A Preparese Success Story

In September of 2021, the US Department of Agriculture announced the Farm and Food Workers Relief (FFWR) grant program to help farmworkers and meatpacking workers with pandemic-related health and safety costs. They’d receive direct payments of up to $600 from state agencies, tribal entities, and non-profit organizations.

The United Farmworker Foundation saw this as a huge opportunity to serve their constituents and applied to be a distributor. In October 2022, they were thrilled to learn they were awarded $97.8 million in distributable funds. But they knew they couldn’t do it alone — they needed a partner who could help them make these distributions digitally, efficiently, and safely.

Leveraging Preparese, the UFW Foundation built and deployed an app to process disbursements, from screening and reviewing applications to submitting purchase orders for prepaid debit cards — in just 10 weeks. A few months later, they launched the farmworker-facing app and began making disbursements.

Since the start of the program, the UFW Foundation and its 9 partner organizations have delivered pandemic relief to farm workers in nearly all states and U.S. territories.

This is just one example of what Preparese can do.

To learn more about how it can help your organization, your constituents, or your own personal growth, visit our website.