Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees - GCIR

The Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) has released Crossing Boundaries, Connecting Communities: Alliance Building for Immigrant Rights and Racial Justice. Produced with support from the Hill-Snowdon Foundation, Open Society Institute and Public Interest Projects, this new report includes detailed case studies of organizations that are forging effective cross racial alliances between immigrant and native-born communities in order to build power and win just policies and practices in their regions. The report features current and former HSF grantee partners, such as CASA de Maryland, Highlander Research and Education Center, the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance and the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance. A tool for both funders and practitioners, this report documents the range of creative strategies being employed to create authentic relationships between diverse constituents. It concludes with recommendations aimed attracting more resources for this innovative, yet under-funded, community strengthening strategy.

This 45-page guidebook provides practical information about living and succeeding in the United States. Offered in Spanish and English (with additional languages to follow), the guide contains 170 essentials covering health, finances, housing, education, civic engagement, laws, and social values that were generated by cross-cultural trainers and research from reliable resources. The guide seeks to build cultural understanding and provide immigrants and refugees
with critical information in one convenient place to ease the integration process.

For more information or for sample copies, email lee@intercambioweb.org.

Ethnic museums have opened all across the United States from California to Connecticut, including seven in Chicago, 25 in New York City, three in Detroit. The newest Detroit entry, opened in 2005 and also a first in the nation, is the Arab American National Museum, developed by the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS) in Dearborn, Michigan.

Similar pride in accomplishment, and similar story telling to cross-cultural barriers, have accompanied this opening. Since September 2001, the public narrative about Arab Americans has been considerably distorted by stereotyping and prejudice. The Museum’s aim is to tell the true and quite diverse story of the accomplishments and contributions of immigrants to America from Arab countries. The $16-million campaign, which was accompanied by a six-month process in which a planning team gathered ideas from Arab-American communities, created 38,500 square feet of exhibits, classroom space, auditorium, and library.

Exhibits at the Arab American National Museum display the cultural contributions of Arab nations throughout history, from the everyday life of Arab Americans to the work of famous politicians. In the words of New York Times critic Edward Rothstein, “ like other museums of American hyphenation,” it is “at once an assertion of difference and belonging, a declaration of distinction and of loyalty.”

“The Arab American National Museum is a door opener for southeast Michigan and the world,” adds Brenda G. Price, community liaison program officer at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. “It offers insight into the Arab culture, its integration into American culture, and the valuable contributions made by members of the Arab community over many generations. The Museum is a testament to the diversity in this country, and the contributions made by immigrants who continue to arrive on this soil.”

The dynamic integration process that weaves America’s receiving society with its newcomer population incorporates the difference, the belonging, the distinction, the loyalty. The country’s many ethnic and immigrant museums—portals in the two-way process—model integration as they enhance it. As the Arab American National Museum humanizes “American hyphenation” in a war-onterror America in which the “other” can be so readily demonized, the Tenement Museum reminds us that one way to combat dehumanization is to acknowledge the hyphen in us all.

One of those who died on September 11 at the World Trade Center was Frank Reisman, a great-great-grandson of Nathalie Gumpertz, the woman who turned to dressmaking when her husband disappeared on the Lower East Side in 1874. As part of the memorial to the family that started its American journey at 97 Orchard Street, Mr. Reisman’s story has been incorporated into the Tenement Museum’s Gumpertz tour.

In the words of the Driehaus Foundation’s Sunny Fischer, “How can one help but be moved.”

The Tenement Museum is a portal in the two-way process of immigrant integration, bringing the newly arrived together with native-born descendants of the once newly arrived, animating their common heritage, fostering dialogue and interaction. Guided by the vision of Ruth J. Abram, its founder and president, the Museum has played a leading role in the development of such civic consciousness in ethnic museums around the United States.

“Museum science has changed because of Ruth Abram,” says Sunny Fischer, executive director of the Chicago-based Richard H. Driehaus Foundation. Fischer visited the Tenement Museum during a Ford Foundation event on the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience. “The power of the place was palpable,” she says. “People actually lived here. The funder in me saw the intelligence, the smartness of connecting history to what is happening today.”

Fischer invited Abram, who has since become a friend, to speak to Chicago funders. One of the many initiatives that got a boost from the example of the Tenement Museum was Chicago’s Cambodian American Heritage Museum and Killing Fields Memorial, a project of the Cambodian Association of Illinois. The first in the United States, the Cambodian American Heritage Museum offers cultural exhibits, arts events, and a curriculum to teach high-school students about Cambodian-American history and culture. Its Killing Fields Memorial, a cathartic act of communal healing, will eventually inscribe on 80 glass columns the names of as many as 4,000 Cambodian genocide victims, all relatives of the Cambodian families who have resettled in the Chicago area.

“A people who forget the past and who don’t take account of their history cannot build a future,” says a prominent Cambodian leader.

Cambodian-American refugees in Chicago are building a future by bearing witness to the stories of their horrors, sharing those stories with the wider community.

The pride engendered in the Cambodian American community through its fundraising efforts has been accompanied by an extraordinary connection with Chicago’s Jewish community. “This was a product of a community trying to coalesce and deal with its own issues,” says Nikki Stein, executive director of the Polk Bros. Foundation. “But a number of Jewish families and foundations participated… you just can’t look at the Cambodian community and not see your own.”

The cross-cultural connection goes back 30 years to the Jewish Federation’s resettlement help with newly arrived Cambodian refugees. The relationship blossomed as fundraising for the museum got underway. As Kompha Seth, executive director of the Cambodian Association of Illinois, recalls, “I said I only had $300 in the bank. And a Jewish donor gave me a $5,000 challenge grant that started the building fund, and within two weeks, we had $30,000.” Some 70 percent of the multimillion dollar Campaign for Hope and Renewal came from the Jewish community.

The Museum has documented such details for 1,300 former residents of the tenement, bringing their stories to hundreds of thousands of visitors annually— both on site and online. Authentically decorated apartments—the look, the lighting, the clothing, even the smells— help highly trained docent educators to humanize this American narrative, pursuing the Museum’s mission “to promote tolerance and historical perspective through the presentation of the variety of immigrant and migrant experiences on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a gateway to America.”

Tolerance and historical perspective are promoted by many other Museum programs. Current immigrants learn English in classes that use memoirs, diaries, and letters of earlier newcomers; graduates develop guides for other participants. Native-born audience members are invited to tell the stories of their immigrant ancestors to improvisational actors, who turn anecdotes into on-the-spot theater presentations. Collaborations with other institutions engage immigrant youth in writing and performing original plays and offer training in the museum profession for immigrant adults. The Lower East Side Community Preservation Project, launched by the Museum, brings together diverse residents to select, preserve, and interpret local historic sites.

In 1863, Lucas Glockner invested $8,000 to build a tenement on a single-family lot in Lower Manhattan's East Side. He moved into one of the apartments with his family, and over the next 72 years, some 7,000 newcomers to America did the same, immigrants from 20 countries.

Since 1988, when Glockner's former home at 97 Orchard Street became the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the stories of many of these new Americans have been brought back to life in the same tiny apartments they once occupied.

When her husband Julius left for work one morning and never returned, Nathalie Gumpertz, a Jewish immigrant from Prussia, bought a sewing machine and ended up supporting three daughters by making dresses for neighbors. The Rogharshevsky family from Lithuania filled their three rooms with their six children—girls bedded in the kitchen, boys on the front couch—while father Abraham worked until his death from tuberculosis as a presser in a garment shop. The Sicilian Baldizzi family weathered the Great Depression at 97 Orchard: Adolfo, who had been a fine woodworker in Italy, walked the streets with his toolbox in search of odd jobs.

While children's quality of life improved from the mid-1990s through 2002, further progress has stalled, according to the Foundation for Child Development's 2007 Child and Youth Well-Being Index (CWI). This stall can be found across five of the CWI's seven domains. The exceptions are children's health, which continues its dramatic decline, and children's safety and behavior, which continues to improve.

Synthesizes research on key contemporary race issues. In Volume 1, leading scholars address demographic changes, immigration trends, racial attitudes, racial and ethnic trends in education, and residential segregation; Volume 2 covers trends in the justice system, labor force and welfare, and health.