Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees - GCIR

The Lloyd A. Fry Foundation has funded a unique collaboration between the Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS) and the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law (Center) to develop a comprehensive plan for increasing LEP individuals' access to IDHS services. IDHS is the largest Illinois public agency, with over 15,000 employees and an annual budget of over $5 billion. Its seven divisions provide most of the state's safety-net and self-sufficiency services, including welfare, mental health programs, alcoholism and substance abuse treatment and prevention services, programs for people with developmental disabilities, health services for women and children, prevention services for domestic violence and at-risk youth, and rehabilitation services.

The Fry Foundation's $50,000 grant to the Center has allowed a team of experts to conduct a demographic analysis and assessment of IDHS's language capacities. IDHS has given the Center's staff and experts access to departmental documents and made senior staff available for interviews. The Center will make detailed recommendations, which IDHS © Jupiter Images will use to develop a new language access plan that is expected to serve as a model for other state agencies.

Both IDHS and the Center credit the Fry Foundation for encouraging a partnership between agencies that have not always seen eye-to-eye. As Unmi Song, executive director of the Fry Foundation, observes, "Developing a plan for increasing immigrants' access to health and social services requires that it be informed both by the needs of the community and government institutions... Because these parties were willing to collaborate, there was an opportunity to develop a process and plan that everyone could support." The Community Memorial Foundation and Michael Reese Health Trust have also provided support for this project.

Shortly after San Francisco became one of the first municipalities in the United States to adopt a local language access ordinance in 2001, the Zellerbach Family Foundation provided Chinese for Affirmative Action/Center for Asian American Advocacy (CAA) a multi-year grant to monitor implementation and provide technical assistance to government agencies which faced challenges in meeting the new mandates.

Over a four-year period, CAA developed a community coalition that worked with law enforcement, public housing, human services, public health, and renters' assistance agencies to improve their capacity to serve LEP populations. The coalition's advocacy led these agencies to add bilingual staff positions and develop formalized procedures and staff trainings. For instance, in response to two police shootings of LEP individuals in 2003 and 2004, the coalition convinced the San Francisco Police Department to develop a curriculum and video training to instruct officers on how to interact with persons with limited English skills. Under this program, all patrol officers are given a multilingual card that allows LEP persons to identify their native language. Officers are also required to use telephone interpretation services when no bilingual police staff is available.

According to Lina Avidan, program executive at the Zellerbach Family Foundation, "This project demonstrates that language access is essential for the timely integration of newcomers into local communities. Beyond the impact of its work with immigrants, CAA has helped elected and appointed officials recognize that the entire community benefits when all residents have access to essential services and understand their rights and responsibilities as community members." The Zellerbach Family Foundation has since expanded its funding to provide support for similar work in Oakland, California.

With support from The Minneapolis Foundation, the Southeast Asian Community Council (SACC) developed and distributed interpreter request cards to Hmong-speaking individuals who use the card when they come into contact with police officers. Each card lists the telephone numbers of an Englishspeaking family member, SACC, and interpreter telephone services, so that police officers have several options for finding interpreters to communicate in Hmong. Three local police departments in the Minneapolis/Saint Paul metropolitan area and the state police agency have trained officers to respond to the usage of this card.

While an increasing number of states and municipalities have adopted language access policies in recent years, there are relatively few resources outside of the health care sector to assist practitioners in implementing these new requirements. In response, the Annie E. Casey Foundation launched a project to facilitate peer-to-peer learning and collaboration among government practitioners, as well as to develop best practices publications and web-based resources for public agencies serving LEP children, youth, and families. A primary goal is to build the capacity of child- and family-serving agencies to design and implement high-quality language access models.

The project seeks to develop a national peer network of experienced and new practitioners to document effective policies, program implementation, and evaluation methods. It also aims to develop ways of assessing the effectiveness of language access services to improve service delivery and outcomes for LEP children and families.

One example is a grant to the New York City's Administration for Children Services to develop a comprehensive plan for serving LEP families, making it one of first public child welfare agencies in the country to do so. The grant aims to make a wide range of agency services- child care and Head Start, child protection, preventive services, and foster care-available in the six major non-English languages in New York City.

"Immigrant families whose primary language is not English pose a special challenge to public systems and a special burden to children who may be asked to provide translation services," says Irene Lee, senior associate at the Annie E. Casey Foundation. "The Foundation is committed to promoting the goal that vulnerable immigrant children and families successfully learn English and have access to high-quality, low-cost social and financial services in their native languages, so they can become fully integrated into their communities socially, politically, and economically."

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.

Foundations are playing an important role in making government services more accessible for LEP individuals. Individual grants are generally in the range of $25,000 to $75,000, although some health care initiatives are considerably larger. Foundation grants have supported technical assistance and planning to government agencies, partnerships between public agencies and immigrant organizations, and implementation of policy reforms. This section highlights some of the promising practices to improve language access in government agencies in the United States.

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.