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Our Approach: The Community Level — Workers’ Rights Grants Program

A very important area of Levi Strauss & Co.’s (LS&CO.) philanthropy and the Levi Strauss Foundation’s grant making focuses on strengthening workers' rights and improving working and living conditions in communities where our products are made. LS&CO. and the Levi Strauss Foundation focus on long-term benefits for workers, their families and communities by providing grants to innovative local, regional or global nonprofit organizations to support programs that:

• Disseminate information about workplace rights and responsibilities to workers and managers and monitor and enforce labor law protections;
• Increase understanding of health issues — especially communicable diseases like HIV/AIDS — and promote access to asset-building and life skills training; and
• Link trade liberalization initiatives with labor and human rights protections and build the capacity of countries.

Examples of workers’ rights grants include:

• A 2004 grant to SHEVA, a nongovernmental organization in Bangladesh, to fund the education of factory workers on local labor laws, codes of conduct and improved management systems, including the institution of employee grievance procedures.
• Since 1999, the foundation has funded The Asia Foundation project. To date, the project has educated more than 250,000 migrant women workers in China on their workplace rights, financial literacy and basic health care. With funding from the Levi Strauss Foundation, the Asia Foundation also launched the first legal aid organization focused solely on migrant workers in the Pearl River Delta, where most of the manufacturing in China occurs.
• The foundation has made grants to FINCA International every year since 1999 to establish various asset-building and educational programs. These programs will create and expand community-based micro-lending programs for low income women in areas of Mexico and Guatemala where garment industry jobs are increasingly being lost. The programs will increase employment options and opportunities for workers and their families in the region and, thereby, increase the bargaining power of factory workers.

View the complete list of workers’ rights grants: 1999 - 2005