A Syllable at a Time: Lincoln Literacy's 50-year legacy with Vietnamese community

SOS Búsqueda y Rescate (or SOS Search and Rescue) is a woman-led border and migrant search-and-rescue group that braves the elements — like extreme desert temperatures — to locate migrants who get lost or left behind along their journey from Mexico to the U.S. Since 2020, the volunteer group has found 60 survivors and the remains of 65 others, allowing them to offer closure for families searching for their loved ones.

Catholic Charities helps immigrants and refugees access housing and transition to life in a new country. Housing is the first step in the resettlement process, but Catholic Charities also helps immigrants find jobs, get their children in school and integrate into the community. In 2007, Fort Wayne welcomed 3,500 Burmese refugees. By 2016 the number had grown to more than 6,000 and counting.

San Diego County public schools have a large number of refugee students and changes such as lowering noise levels (such as school bells) that triggered post-traumatic stress, reducing class sizes, providing daily teacher consistency, and integrating language and academic instruction has helped them feel more comfortable and fill the gaps in their education. Not all of the interventions have led to academic success, but schools are juggling very limited budgets to address the specific needs of refugee students, including extra English language instruction and counseling services.

The Migrant Education Program, which offers educational and social services to migrant worker families in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, is growing in popularity among the valley’s migrant worker population, and has recently begun to focus on getting migrant students geared up for college .

To address enrollment decline in St. Paul Public Schools, the district invested in language and cultural programs that cater to local immigrant communities. After four years of implementing Hmong, Spanish, Mandarin, and East African language and cultural programs, student enrollment is now rising.

The Manhattan Afghan Resettlement Team (MART) helps Afghan refugees escape Taliban oppression and build new lives in the U.S. MART helps to connect refugees with the local Islamic Center for meetings about adjusting to life in the U.S. and language courses, as well as help getting a Social Security card, a job and enrolling their children in school. To date, over 100 refugees have been successfully resettled.

The Myanmar Curriculum pilot project allows Rohingya children living in Bangladeshi refugee camps to be educated with the curriculum and language of their native country. The aim to make an eventual return to their home country easier. So far, 200,000 children have been enrolled, mostly in grades 1 through 4. UNICEF plans to scale the program to cover all 410,000 school-age children in the camps.

The humanitarian organization known as Refugee Support in Nicosia, Cyrpus has been using WhatsApp to provide useful information to refugee populations during the coronavirus pandemic in addition to delivering food to 200 people per week. Although the organization is limited in who they can offer help to due to financial feasibility, the group has still been able to ease the "tension, conflict, and frustration between migrants during the process of being quarantined."

The New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia (NSM) adjusted its promotora model of organizing, which relies on neighbor-to-neighbor interaction to assess community needs, due to Covid-19. The immigrant justice nonprofit now runs zoom meetings and phone banks to talk with hard hit immigrant communities. NSM, fundraising with a coalition of 40 other groups, also provides financial support to immigrant families who cannot access federal aid. They gave money to 150 families, with 100 more on the waitlist. They hired a few laid off community members and try to give promotores some money, but funding is limited.

When asylum seekers are released from the Aurora, Colorado immigration center, many seek help and community from the nonprofit organization, Casa de Paz. Based in Denver, the nonprofit offers these individuals and any visiting family members a place to stay and helps connect them with community resources.