Like the ancestors of today's native born, newcomers fill crucial jobs, revitalize communities, and contribute to the nation's social and economic growth. And like previous generations of immigrants who came before them, today's newcomers also face challenges to participation and integration. Discrimination, cross-cultural misunderstanding, and injustice in the workplace and the community can create cynicism and erect formidable barriers to engagement and integration. Long hours at work can steal time from family and community life; limited formal education can stall the learning of English and full entry into society. Parents who are isolated can pass isolation on to the next generation.
Yet, with the critically important support of foundation-funded community organizations, more and more newcomers--whether they are undocumented immigrants or naturalized citizens, restaurant workers or high-tech professionals, from Africa, Asia, or Central America--are overcoming these challenges by becoming actively engaged at all levels of our democracy. This report highlights but a few examples of their participation and the impact they are having at the grassroots, grasstops, and every level in between. As their numbers continue to grow, immigrants and their families, with strategic community interventions, can play an increasingly important role in strengthening the social fabric of our country.
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Growing Philanthropic Interest
Responding to demographic change, foundations of varying type, geographic focus, and funding priority are investing in a range of newcomer civic participation strategies.
- Foundations with categorical interests are successfully using immigrant civic engagement to improve health, education, youth, and employment outcomes. They are funding, for example, programs to engage parents in their children's education, train health promotoras to do prevention education, and bring diverse youth together to organize against racial and ethnic profiling.
- Foundations seeking systemic policy reform in these areas are recognizing immigrants to be important allies and often leaders in policy advocacy and organizing efforts that they support.
- Likewise, foundations devoted to the preservation of worker, civil, and/or human rights are funding efforts that engage immigrants in the struggle, recognizing the impact of these issues on immigrants and the important role immigrants can play in effective change.
- Foundations with interest in improving intergroup relations, building community, and reviving civic life are actively involving our 11 percent and growing foreign-born population, drawing on their strengths and assets to address these persistent community challenges.
- Growing numbers of foundations interested in improving social conditions of any kind are acknowledging that both newcomers and the community at large have a stake in and stand to benefit from immigrant civic participation. They also understand that, in the absence of engagement and integration, the isolation of newcomers can only lead to greater problems.
Regardless of their funding priorities, many foundations are increasingly recognizing immigrants and refugees as a key population to which they must respond. Many are asking important questions about how their grantee organizations are engaging newcomers in their work and integrating this growing population into the broader community.
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The Value of Civic Participation
Civic participation is the process that draws newcomers into collective problem solving to improve conditions in matters affecting their lives. Based on the democratic belief that sustainable social improvement is possible only when those experiencing problems are involved in learning how to solve them, civic participation turns communities into places of intentional learning and relationship building. It does so by engaging people collectively in all aspects of problem selection and solution: identification and analysis of issues, research and planning toward strategies of approach, and implementation and evaluation of these strategic plans.
Both an end in itself and a means to other ends, newcomer participation produces results at individual, organizational and community levels. Through civic participation, newcomers:
- Develop their human capital, i.e., their individual potential, leadership and voice, with measures of acquired skills, knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. In the words of one immigrant civic participant, "Before, I was shy and scared, but [becoming involved] helped me to build my own voice. I can go everywhere now... We women are hungry to bring Somali power to the community."
- Build social capital, i.e., networks of human and institutional relationships, with measures of depth, breadth, diversity, and durability. One community organizer puts it this way: "To build relationships you want to focus on what's common, get people working together to improve quality-of-life issues they share."
- Develop institutional capital, i.e., democratic, membership-based organizations, with measures of member ownership and participation in decision making and governance. A community-based researcher offers this analysis: "We can't change education levels, English language skills, and economic levels overnight. But we can change organizations to engage immigrants. Without these organizations, we can't have immigrant civic participation."
- Create community capital, i.e., positive community change, with measures of policies improved, systems and institutions made more accountable, problems solved or prevented. A former director of a worker center writes, "On September 17, 1997, Governor George Pataki of New York signed the Unpaid Wages Prohibition Act, giving New York State the strongest wage enforcement law in the country. That Act was won through a campaign conceived of and led by immigrant workers."[source]
- Become full, contributing members of American society and democratic life. This is true for all immigrants, regardless of their immigration status. From an immigrant labor leader: "Even though not everyone can vote, everyone can participate."
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Fundamental Guiding Principles
Four fundamental principles shape effective civic participation efforts and can assist foundations in evaluating projects and institutions engaging newcomers in civic life.
- Engagement is paramount. Newcomers are encouraged to engage in all aspects of community problem solving.
- Participation starts where the newcomer starts. More than likely this begins with working on issues that affect their daily lives, not in a voting booth or a political campaign, though it is the way to get there.
- Education informs all. Learning is at the core of program design.
- Relationship matters. Building relationships with people from different backgrounds is a central program component.
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Diverse Opportunities for Foundation Investment
Guided by the principles of community organizing and popular education, newcomer civic participation takes place in a variety of organizational settings, including:
- National community organizing networks and neighborhood centers;
- Affiliations through the affinities of faith, ethnicity and common concern; and
- Unions, churches, schools, and community arts programs.
These diverse pathways to civic engagement for immigrants offer rich opportunities for philanthropic investment, such as:
- Naturalization programs that integrate civic participation into their curricula, making the preparation for citizenship a preparation for full engagement in civic life.
- National and local faith-based organizing networks that organize immigrants around key social and economic issues as wide-ranging as health care, community disinvestment, police brutality, and workers' rights.
- Efforts to promote cultural expression and exchange that provide immigrants and refugees a powerful entrée into public life and an opportunity to build relationship with native-born communities.
- Youth organizing institutions that cultivate the leadership of young people, often bringing them together across lines of race, ethnicity, religion, and immigration status.
- Community-labor partnerships that engage low-wage immigrant workers and their allies in improving wages, working conditions, and community life.
- Worker Centers and Hometown Associations that are emerging avenues for immigrant civic engagement and leadership development on many levels, from organizing soccer leagues to fighting against unscrupulous employers to fundraising for community-improvement projects.
- Training and technical assistance intermediaries that are developing immigrant organizers and helping service and advocacy institutions integrate civic participation approaches into their work.
- Non-partisan voter education, get-out-the-vote efforts, and leadership development programs that give immigrants of any status, regardless of their ability to vote, the tools they need to engage effectively in our nation's political process.
Civic engagement is the democracy at work, producing multiple outcomes of positive change, and interrelated goals that cannot be reached in other ways. As America's demographic diversity becomes inevitably more representative of the diversity of the world, simultaneously testing our ideals and increasing our assets, foundations of many types and priorities have reason to consider investment in newcomer civic participation.
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