After 50 years with the farm worker movement his father began, Paul F. Chavez retired in 2024 from the day-to-day responsibilities of leading what is now the Cesar Chavez Foundation. He continues serving as chair of the foundation’s Board of Directors and remains active with the farm worker movement. Paul transformed the Chavez foundation, founded in the 1960s, into a collection of successful social enterprises aiding millions of Latinos and other working families across the Southwestern United States.

Paul dedicated himself to fulfilling his father’s vision that it would take more than a union to overcome the crippling dilemmas farm workers and other poor working people face upon returning from work to their communities; it would take a movement. Spending his entire life with that movement—and working directly with his dad for nearly 20 years—he was a union organizer, negotiator and administrative assistant to the farm labor and civil rights leader. He managed the UFW’s direct marketing operation and was the union’s legislative director in Sacramento and Washington, D.C.

When he was asked to lead what today is the Chavez foundation in 1991, Paul’s charge from his father was to give it a reason for existing. So, he worked hard transforming it from a small non-profit into a series of highly successful social enterprises, overseeing its dramatic growth and substantially improving poor people’s lives through four principal programs: building or renovating and managing nearly 6,000 units of high quality affordable housing for families and seniors in four states; entertaining, educating and community engagement through a network of radio stations and multiple platforms reaching millions of people; supplying academic services to 150-plus school districts and partners; and operating the National Chavez Center to preserve the legacy of Cesar Chavez across the nation.

As a young boy in the early 1960s, Paul joined his seven brothers and sisters on weekends in Central Valley farm towns, handing out leaflets and helping their father build the union that would become the United Farm Workers. Paul and his family endured the hardships and sacrifices of the five-year-long Delano grape strike and boycott, and the difficult struggles that followed. Growing up in the movement, they also learned to share their father with so many others.