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REFUGEE PARENT INTERVIEWS
In order to gather first-hand accounts
of parenting and resettlement challenges
and successes, BRYCS staff are conducting
a series of interviews with refugee parents.
Each interview summary will be followed
by several discussion questions, so that
refugee serving agencies can use the interviews
as a staff development tool.
 Newest interview: Toma, an Iraqi Father
Previous parenting interviews
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PROMISING PRACTICES
FOR REFUGEE-SERVING
PROGRAMS
The Families Together Program in San Diego, California, is the only “Healthy Families America” site in the nation that works exclusively with East African refugee and immigrant families. The purpose of the program is to reduce child abuse and foster healthy, happy and successful families. Services are conducted through home visits by East African women as well as monthly meetings.
Child Abuse Prevention and Intervention Services are provided to refugee and immigrant families in Columbus, Ohio through Community Refugee and Immigration Services. These services are provided to families through home visits and one-on-one conversations between parents and service providers, who are typically of the same background as the families. Services are provided primarily to Somalis and Latinos.
The Pittsburgh Refugee Healthy Families Program, coordinated by Jewish Family & Children’s Service, helps refugees learn ways to maintain healthy families, by strengthening their communication and conflict resolution skills as they adjust to American culture. This program serves all refugee groups, including many of the recently arrived Burmese and Karen.
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BRYCS will continue to develop our “promising
practices” series in the coming months as we
share the innovative work being accomplished by programs
serving refugee children and their families throughout
the United States. Please be sure to visit BRYCS'
Targeted Resources for Program
Managers, where you will find a link to the complete
list of Program Descriptions in the Clearinghouse.
If you have a program to share, or are aware of
any creative efforts towards enhancing services
for refugee children, please contact BRYCS with
the details. We want to recognize and profile these
efforts, so that others can learn from them. We
are also interested in hearing from you about what
tools, resources or mechanisms that you would like
to learn more about. Email
info at brycs.org or call 202-541-3232 to speak
with our Outreach and Information Coordinator.
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| Bridging
Refugee Youth and Children’s Services (BRYCS)
is a national technical assistance project working to broaden
the scope of information and collaboration among service providers
- in order to strengthen services to refugee youth, children
and their families. Read more about our mission and services.
Who is a refugee?
Now
you can sign up online to receive the BRYCS Bulletin Alert
via email, as well as sign up for our new BRYCS Discussion
Listserv.
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BRYCS is pleased to present our newest publication, Raising
Children in a New Country: An Illustrated Handbook.
This booklet was created as a tool for refugee and immigrant
serving agencies, as they help newcomer parents adjust to
the different laws, norms and practices around raising children
in the United States. Please see our Publications
page if you prefer to download the handbook in smaller
segments. To order print or CD copies of the Handbook, please
email info@brycs.org or
call 1-888-572-6500. If you are interested in translating
this book into other languages, please refer to the Translation
and Copyright Guidelines for Service Providers and
accompanying sample cover page in PDF
or MSWord
format.
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FALL
2008 SPOTLIGHT
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Ellen, a 14-year-old Liberian youth, was reunited with her mother whom she had not seen since the age of three. She moved in with her mother and joined her new step-father and two younger step-sisters. Not long after her arrival, tension within the family increased. Her mother and step-father became frustrated… soon they began talking about “sending her back to Liberia.”
BRYCS social workers often receive calls like this for assistance with addressing severe conflict between parents or guardians and their children. The most common problems arise due to distant or renewed family relationships, or due to resettlement stresses which compromise parenting skills. To help caseworkers assisting such families, this Spotlight article provides information on preventing and responding to these types of situations. For more information on the issues addressed in this Spotlight article, see the Lists of Highlighted Resources on family preservation and strengthening as well as the Refugee Healthy Marriage Initiative. To see any of the past Spotlights or lists of highlighted resources by topic, please visit the archive.
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WHAT'S
NEW - NOVEMBER 2008 |
ANNOUNCEMENTS
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BRYCS is now providing technical assistance to Refugee School Impact sites! With additional support from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), BRYCS and ORR are closely collaborating to support these programs serving refugee children in the schools. Upcoming projects will include a listserv, a Web page, and an education toolkit, among others. BRYCS is currently conducting outreach with school impact staff from all 35 states and would love to speak with if we haven’t already!
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Did you know that BRYCS has hundreds of multilingual resources in our Clearinghouse? BRYCS recently updated the part of our site that features these multilingual resources. This section takes you to all of the resources in the Clearinghouse in each language. Would you like to further narrow your search by keyword? If so, do an Advanced Search in the Clearinghouse
- BRYCS recently updated our List of Highlighted Resources for the Burmese with new resources. If you know of a resource that should be on this list, please let us know!
EVENTS
FUNDING
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Does your agency serve refugee or immigrant families who are caring for relatives’ children? The Brookdale Foundation is accepting applications for its Relatives as Parents Program Local and Regional Seed Grant Initiative for 2009. The initiative aims to support programs that are developing or expanding services for grandparents and other relatives who are raising children. Mini-grants are provided over a 2-year period to local agencies and State public agencies; ongoing technical assistance for grantees is included. The deadline for submission is December 4, 2008.
- Allstate Foundation offers grants to tax-exempt nonprofit organizations that, among other initiatives, work to teach tolerance to children and end discrimination, including hate crimes. National and local programs, especially those that also focus on economic empowerment, are eligible. Deadlines are rolling throughout the year.
- Actress Rosie O’Donnell’s Early Childhood Care and Education grant awards funds of $5,000 to $15,000 to 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations that provide top-notch, licensed care and education to children from low-income families. Grantees may use the funds to subsidize tuition, purchase supplies or upgrade equipment, undergo playground construction and other small renovations, and conduct staff developmental outreach. Deadline is rolling throughout the year.
RESOURCES
For Refugee and Immigrant Youth
- Hmong National Development, Inc. (HND) is offering educational scholarships to Hmong students in the United States bound for college during the 2009-2010 school year. HND is a non-profit dedicated to “building capacity, developing leadership and empowering the Hmong American community.” The scholarship will be awarded to a Hmong student intending to enroll full-time at an accredited college or university for undergraduate or graduate study. Deadline is no later than December 1, 2009.
- Sharing Family Strengths Activity Booklet, recently released by Minnesota’s Family and Children’s Services, has several activities that service-providers could use to engage with refugee youth and their families. Family and Children’s Services made this booklet after working with over 2000 families to learn what these diverse individuals considered most important in building strong, healthy families.
Child Welfare
Education
- The newly updated Toolkit for Refugee Civic Participation in the School System is meant to help community-based organizations develop their own plan to increase refugee concern for educational issues and, as a result, increase refugee community participation in the school system. This guide outlines the benefits of civic involvement and the challenges that refugee parents might encounter and strive to overcome in pursuing participation in the school system. They list promising practices across the country, and highlight BRYCS as a go-to organization to learn more about parent involvement and education issues for refugee youth!
- Successful Parent-Teacher Conferences with Bilingual Families is a step-by-step guide for teachers/school administrators in conducting parent-teacher conferences with parents from a different culture, who speak a different language. This recent article by AdLit.org provides a specific outline of ideas and tasks that teachers can do before, during and after a parent-teacher conference to make it as successful as possible.
- The webinar Serving Diverse Families: Strategies for Early Childhood Service Providers is devised for early childhood intervention and early childhood special education professionals, who want to effectively reach out to children with disabilities from diverse cultural backgrounds. This two hour footage provides strategies, practical tips and a concluding case study to help illustrate how best to employ the lessons learned from the webinar.
Youth
- Becoming New Yorkers: Ethnographies of the New Second Generation is an anthology published by the Russell Sage Foundation that is a collection of essays about the second and “1.5” generations of immigrants living in New York City. The editors chose Manhattan as a case study due to it is multiculturalism, but they feel it is exemplary of American society at large. Here, in New York City, they trace how children of immigrants adapt and integrate socially, economically and linguistically. This book is available for purchase from the publisher.
- Children in Immigrant Families: Key to America’s Future by Donald J. Hernandez, Ph.D., provides a very recent overview of the current status of children of immigrants in the United States. Using statistics to illustrate the economic, educational and health needs of immigrant youth, Hernandez proposes what can be done to see to these issues addressed. This piece emphasizes cultural competence and presents thorough information that could help service-providers understand the contexts surrounding immigrant youth in America.
Program Development
- The article Putting It All Together: Guiding Principles for Quality After-School Programs Serving Preteens describes the importance of after-school programs and how service providers can best serve youth with these types of programs. The article outlines six guiding principles, including cultural competence, which should be practiced for effective development of after-school programs.
- Migration Policy Institute’s report Immigration: Data Matters offers detailed and up-to-date data resources on immigration that service providers can use, for example, in writing grant proposals to apply for funding. This report also references other dependable resources, where people can collect further demographics and other specific data on immigrants to the United States
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