Rick Burnette | Fort Meyers, Florida
For over three decades, Rick and Ellen have been engaged in international agriculture development ministry. They served as CBF field personnel for 15 years establishing the Upland Holistic Development Project, an NGO that continues to offer agriculture and community development services among hill tribe minority groups along the Thai-Myanmar border. Rick and Ellen founded the ECHO Asia Impact Center in Thailand before returning to the U.S. to work with ECHO at their Florida headquarters. In 2017 the Burnettes founded Cultivate Abundance.
Together, Rick and Ellen engage in the community-level food security efforts of Cultivate Abundance for the benefit of farmworker families in Immokalee, Florida, and beyond.
Most of the fresh produce in the U.S. is harvested by migrant labor. Migrant farmworker communities often face food insecurity compounded by extreme poverty, discrimination and legal residence issues. Immokalee is a small farming town where the majority of America’s wintertime tomatoes and other crops are produced. Yet Immokalee has a poverty rate of almost 45 percent.
The mission of Cultivate Abundance is to address the cruel irony of food insecurity among those who harvest our food by mobilizing appropriate resources to alleviate hunger and encourage participation in small-scale food production.
Learn more at www.cbf.net/burnette.