Dolores Huerta

Labor Leader and Community Organizer

Dolores Huerta is a labor leader and community organizer, and is president and founder of the Dolores Huerta Foundation. Huerta has worked for civil rights and social justice for over 50 years. In 1962, she and Cesar Chavez founded the United Farm Workers of America. She served as vice-president and played a critical role in many of the union’s accomplishments for four decades.

Huerta has received numerous awards, among them the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award from President Clinton in l998. In 2002, she received the $100,000 Puffin/Nation prize for Creative Citizenship, which she used to establish the Dolores Huerta Foundation (DHF). DHF connects groundbreaking community-based organizing to state and national movements to register and educate voters, advocate for education reform, bring about infrastructure improvements in low-income communities, advocate for greater equality for the LGBT community, and create strong leadership development.

In 2012, President Obama bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States, on Dolores Huerta.