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STRENGTHENING IMMIGRANT INTEGRATION
The concept is simple: facilitate conversations among community members who might otherwise never cross paths. The result is powerful: people helping people in unexpected ways.
“In Boulder County, there are several resources for immigrants, like ESL classes and immigrant rights services,” said Leslie Irwin, coordinator of a four-year Dialogues on Immigrant Integration project under The Colorado Trust’s Supporting Immigrant and Refugee Families Initiative (SIRFI). “But we realized that there wasn’t much opportunity for meaningful communication among immigrants and members of their receiving communities. So we provide forums for people to interact, engage in conversation, create relationships, build understanding and hopefully collaborate over time.”
 Specifically, Dialogues – a coalition of county, city, school and nonprofit leaders and community members – promotes exchange among immigrant and non-immigrant community members.
“Dialogue Groups are based on Study Circle methodology where 8 to 14 people meet every week for two hours over a period of five to six weeks,” said Irwin. “This format encourages immigrants and receiving community members to build relationships in a group setting and really dive into such issues as how immigrant parents can get involved in their kids’ schools. It’s entirely participant-driven – people talk about whatever they think is important, from family issues to legal and human services topics.”
The project also comprises Dialogue Days that bring together 50 to 100 immigrants and receiving community members in facilitated one-day events to foster discussions from various viewpoints, as well as Action Forums that help participants from Dialogue Groups and Dialogue Days put into practice their ideas for collaborative action. Dialogues also provides seed money and technical assistance for various efforts to reach out to immigrants, including support groups and “welcome wagons” that contain helpful pointers for new arrivals.
“Language learning, networking and friendships are corollaries to the Dialogues,” said Irwin. “Some immigrants and receiving community folks continue to build on the relationships with the people they meet – for example, to help immigrants improve their language skills or for a receiving community member to learn Spanish from an immigrant.”
Case in point are Leonard and Jorge who met in a Dialogue Group. Soon, they began meeting regularly with Leonard advising Jorge in his first steps as a small business owner, including how to negotiate the systems, processes and paperwork required to run a business.
“They’ve become good friends,” continued Irwin. “The non-immigrant, experienced White male is helping the younger Mexican male to become more knowledgeable and self-sufficient in his day-to-day life.
“We’ve observed that when people come together in conversation they learn something new about each other, themselves and other cultures. Our bottom line is to enable immigrants and their receiving community to come together and talk about things openly, respectfully and deeply.”
According to Irwin, Dialogues’ grass roots, reality-based approach has already helped meet the challenges of large-scale immigration in Boulder County by bringing together approximately 300 immigrants – primarily from Latin America, the Middle East, China and various European countries – with non-immigrant residents in the past six months.
Indeed, Colorado’s rapidly growing immigrant population and the initial successes of 10 community grantees currently funded under the SIRFI effort led The Trust to commit an additional $4.5 million to support nine more Colorado communities in strengthening immigrant integration. This brings The Trust’s total commitment to SIRFI to $18 million over a 10-year period (2000-2010).
Each of the nine new grantees has received initial grants of $10,000 to bring together broad collaboratives to develop comprehensive immigrant integration plans tailored to the needs of their communities. Collaboratives will include such members as health care providers, educators, businesses, law enforcement, libraries, local government, faith-based organizations, immigrant-serving organizations and immigrants themselves. Following the six- to eight-month planning process, each of the nine communities will be eligible to receive grants of up to $75,000 per year for four years to implement their plans.
The nine new grantee communities are:
1. City and County of Denver
2. Cities of Greeley and Evans
3. City of Commerce City
4. La Plata County
5. Montrose and Delta counties
6. Original Aurora
7. Routt and Moffat counties
8. San Luis Valley
9. Telluride Region.
An independent evaluation of this immigrant integration strategy is being conducted by the Association for the Study and Development of Community in Gaithersburg, Maryland, to assess how communities form collaboratives to support immigrant integration, what community outcomes are achieved and the changes in the sense of integration among immigrants and non-immigrants in the funded communities.
For more information about this initiative, contact Ed Lucero, Senior Program Officer, 303-837-1200, ed@coloradotrust.org. For more information about the associated evaluation, contact Nancy Csuti, Director of Research, Evaluation and Strategic Learning, 303-837-1200, nancy@coloradotrust.org.
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