Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees - GCIR

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.