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SPECIAL
FEATURE:
Promising
Practices
for Refugee-Serving Programs
In
this fourth Sidebar Series on "Promising Practices,"
BRYCS highlights the Strengthening Refugee Families
Program (SRFP) at Catholic Social Services of Central
and Northern Arizona. SRFP is the umbrella program
for three projects-- Refugee Marriage Education,
Relationship Intelligence, and Intergenerational
Education--all of which offer culturally and linguistically
appropriate educational workshops designed to promote
the importance of strong and healthy families.
BRYCS
is highlighting this program for several reasons.
First, the SRFP is clearly a strengths-based approach
that has been successful in identifying and building
on the assets of refugee families and their communities.
Second, SRFP's services encourage a great deal of
engagement and participation by the refugee community
in shaping these services. An on-going participatory
assessment is used with each project, and has allowed
the program to develop a sense of flexibility in
meeting program participants' needs. One outcome
of this participatory approach was the creation
of a new service, the Intergenerational Education
Project, which targets grandparent-grandchild relationships.
Third, the SRFP has built successful collaborations
with the local community, including ethnic-based
organizations, the public schools and other mainstream
agencies, in order to better serve and support refugee
children and their families. Finally, the SRFP Coordinator
has instituted evaluation mechanisms and collected
outcomes, particularly for the Intergenerational
Education Project, that provide information on the
effectiveness of these services.
Read
more about this month's featured program Strengthening
Refugee Families (SRFP) from Catholic Social Services
of Central and Northern Arizona.
BRYCS
presented this program as a "Promising Practice"
at the Catholic Charities USA Conference in Phoenix
on September 18, 2005. View
the SRFP's PowerPoint Presentation.
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
clearinghouse at brycs.org or call 202-541-3232
to speak with our Outreach and Information Coordinator.
You may also submit
your program using our Web form. |
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SUGGEST
A
CLEARINGHOUSE
RESOURCE
The BRYCS
project is acquiring and centralizing resources concerning refugee
children, youth, and families. We are interested
in print and non-print resources, Promising Practices,
descriptions of programs for refugee youth and children,
and other resources of interest to the refugee-serving
community.
The resources
we collect and present through the Clearinghouse are
often accompanied by descriptions from BRYCS, and
include, when available, the full text on the BRYCS
website. BRYCS will continue to update the clearinghouse
as new materials are acquired, reviewed, and included.
Please join
us in making this possible by suggesting relevant
resources. Click on the “Suggest a Resource” link on the
BRYCS homepage, or call toll-free 1-888-572-6500—press
#3 after the prompt. Or send an e-mail to Outreach
& Information Coordinator at
clearinghouse at brycs.org. |
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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?
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OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2005 SPOTLIGHT |
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Family Strengthening Across Cultures:
Parent Support Programs for Refugees
It
is difficult to parent here. [My children] are much
more American than we are, and it is difficult to
get them to listen to us and to value our culture.
[1]
This
quote, from an East African refugee mother living
in the United States, reflects the frustrations
and challenges faced by many refugee and immigrant
parents raising their children in a new country.
Even experienced parents can face such difficulties
in blending the cultures and practices of different
countries.
Refugee parents need support in maintaining strong
relationships with their children and in preventing
problems that can limit their children’s success
in a new country. To aid refugee serving agencies
in helping parents like the one quoted above, BRYCS
has created a new resource, Raising
Children in a New Country: A Toolkit for Working
with Refugee Parents. The Toolkit includes:
- An
overview of research and good practice
in parent education programs for refugees
- Detailed
information about free and fee-based parent
support and education resources for refugee-serving
agencies, including free access to certain curricula,
handouts in different languages and reports
- Program
development guidance, including fundraising
resources and evaluation tools.
This
Parenting Toolkit is ideal for mutual assistance
associations (MAAs), refugee resettlement agencies,
and other organizations providing parent support
and education programs for refugees and newcomers.
Find out more about the Parenting Toolkit and family
strengthening in this month's Spotlight
and also in our Sidebar feature,
where we hightlight the Strengthening
Refugee Families Program (SRFP) at Catholic Social
Services of Central and Northern Arizona.
This month's
featured search highlights family strengthening
resources. Last month's spotlight
highlighting the services of the National Child
Traumatic Stress Network is available in the BRYCS
archive. The accompanying featured
search is available through the BRYCS
archive, along with past resource lists.
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1
Annie E. Casey Foundation (Fall 2003). Casey Connects,
p. 1. Annie E. Casey Foundation: Baltimore, MD. Available
on the Web at: http://www.aecf.org/publications/data/connects_fall_03.pdf
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WHAT'S
NEW |
Just Released
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Understanding
Children, Immigration, and Family Violence,
a collaboration between Learning Systems Group (LSG)
and Family Violence Prevention Fund (FVPF), seeks to
enhance services for immigrant children and families
affected by domestic violence. The issues and recommendations
articulated in this report summarize the findings from
interviews with practitioners, researchers, and experts
across the country. BRYCS representatives Julianne Duncan,
Lyn Morland and Laura Schmidt participated on this National
Workgroup. The report identifies challenges and opportunities
in reaching out to and delivering services to immigrant
children and families affected by domestic violence,
best practices in serving them, and policy implications
for the work. |
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Study of Child Welfare Interventions with Refugee Families
in Texas, by Ilze Earner, PhD, Hunter College
School of Social Work, New York, and commissioned by
BRYCS, takes an “on the ground” look in
Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, and Austin, Texas, regarding
the interaction of refugee and immigrant populations
with public child welfare services in these three high-impact
areas. |
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New Resources
New
Briefs from the Family
Strengthening Policy Center, provide practice-driven
information on new and promising practices in the family
strengthening field that produce meaningful outcomes for
families and communities. This series of ten briefs include
an introduction to family strengthening; connecting families,
schools, and community resources; parental involvement in
education; mentoring; community violence prevention; youth
development; and family-centered community building.
The National
Resource Center for Family-Centered Practice and Permanency
Planning and the Child
Welfare League of America are hosting a series
of teleconferences for state program managers in
foster care and adoption. Their latest teleconference, together
with handouts, is now available for free
download. Past teleconferences and handouts can also
be accessed from this webpage.
Academy
Online offers free internet courses produced by the
National Children's Advocacy Center in Huntsville, AL. The
academy serves to model and promote excellence in child
abuse response and prevention.
Health
Intervention
with Traumatized Children, a publication from the
Skillman Center for Children at Wayne State University,
describes a trauma response kit developed to address Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder (PTSD) in children and adolescents. Specific
nterventions are outlined, as well as a clinically-based
assessment tool that identifies current reactions to trauma
and provides a baseline for comparison with post-treatment
measures.
New CDC
Fact Sheets for influenza are available in seven languages
(Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Tagalong, French, Vietnamese
and Chinese), and for avian flu (available in English).
Hurricane
Response
The Fall 2005
edition of the Annie E. Casey Foundation's newsletter, Casey
Connects, is a special electronic issue designed
to chronicle evolving responses from their network of grantees
and partners to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina.
The Children in Care section describes the plight of the
roughly 240 children in the care of the juvenile justice
system.m.
Upcoming Events
National
Family Week: Connections Count, is November 20-26, 2005.
Visit www.nationalfamilyweek.org
or call 1-800-221-2681 to learn more about National Family
Week.
COMING
SOON:
Community-Building:
BRYCS has moved to a bi-monthly feature update schedule,
while keeping our monthly update of new resources and events.
Our December Spotlight and “Promising Practices”
Sidebar will provide an in-depth look at community-building
for enhancing the welfare of refugee children and families.
Our Featured Search on community-building will highlight
practical resources that are available for free download,
and lead to a larger search from our Clearinghouse.
Streaming
Video: Those who use our Web site regularly are often
surprised to learn about the depth and breadth of resources
available from our Clearinghouse. For this reason, we are
developing a streaming video demonstrating how to find resources
on brycs.org. Look for an announcement soon!
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