BRYCS What’s New Updates for September 2019

ANNOUNCEMENTS   |   EVENTS   |   FUNDING   |   RESOURCES   |   BACK TO TOP

ANNOUNCEMENTS

• Welcoming Week 2019 will take place September 13-22, 2019. During this annual series of events, communities bring together immigrants and those born within their countries in a spirit of unity to build strong connections across their communities and affirm the benefits of welcoming everyone. Additionally, the 105th World Migrant and Refugee Day (WMRD) will be celebrated on Sunday 29 September 2019! It has as its theme “It’s not only about migrants”. How will you be celebrating?
• September is National Hispanic Heritage Month! This year’s theme, “Hispanic Americans: A History of Serving Our Nation”, invites everyone to reflect on Hispanic American’s service and contributions to the history of the United States.
• Welcoming Immigrant Students in School, bilingual resources and tools from Intercultural Development Research Association, serve as a good reminder that public schools, by law, must serve all children.

ANNOUNCEMENTS   |   EVENTS   |   FUNDING   |   RESOURCES   |   BACK TO TOP

EVENTS/CALL FOR PAPERS

• Immigration Enforcement and Protecting Families: The Role of Child Welfare Agencies, a webinar from Child Welfare League of America (CWLA), will take place September 10, 2019 at 1:30PM ET. This webinar will review current border detention and protection policies for children who are immigrants crossing the border, as well as interior immigration enforcement policies that impact child and family separation.  The presentation will describe the distinction between federal agency and state child welfare agency roles in protecting children who are immigrants, and will provide recommendations for community-based agencies to support families in preparing for immigration enforcement. (Description from source)
• Data Visualization Training, a webinar from the National Research Center on Hispanic Children & Families, will take place September 10, 2019, from 2-3:00PM ET. The training will provide an introduction into best practices of data visualization and showcase examples with increasing complexity using Excel, Tableau, R, ArcGIS, Q GIS, and MapInfo Professional, among other tools.
• The Asia Pacific Short Course on Refugee Rights and Advocacy will take place November 25-29, 2019 in Bangkok, Thailand.  The course aims to strengthen participants’ understanding of forced migration in the Asia Pacific through a human rights perspective. The course also seeks to strengthen participants’ capacity and knowledge in advocating for the rights of refugees in this region. Apply by September 15, 2019.
• Partnering with Schools to Provide Safe and Inclusive Learning Environments for Refugee Students, a Switchboard webinar, will take place September 19,2019 from 3-4PM ET. This webinar will discuss how refugee service providers can collaborate with school districts to take proactive measures in promoting safety and inclusiveness, as well as how to partner when responding to bullying and harassment of refugee students.
• Catholic Charities 2019 Annual Gathering will take place September 25-27 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Join other professionals, volunteers, and partners to strategize about poverty reduction and celebrate a shared identity. Attendees will come away with innovative program ideas, templates for future work and new skills to meet the needs of those we serve.
• Data-Driven State Refugee Programs: Lessons from the Field on Using Data to Improve Refugee Programs, a Switchboard webinar, will take place September 26, 2019 from 12-1PM ET. This webinar will present key highlights from a recently published toolkit on effectively using data to measure and improve refugee services. This will include examples and lessons learned from states leveraging existing reporting data, building new client-centered databases, and learning about their programs in other innovative ways.
• International Social Service, USA (ISS-USA)’s 7th Annual Conference, Beyond Separation: Protecting Cross Border Families, co-hosted by the University of Maryland School of Social Work, will take place October 17-18, 2019 in Baltimore, Maryland. The two-day event will cover how legal, judicial, social service, and advocacy professionals share and implement best practices to protect the long term safety of cross border children and families.
• Forced Migration, Protection, and Border Control, the Center for Migration Studies (CMS) annual academic and policy symposium, will take place on October 17, 2019 from 8:30AM to 5PM in New York, New York. Leading scholars, policy experts, and practitioners will examine the interplay between border externalization and enforcement policies and refugee protection (writ large) in the United States and throughout the world.  Particular attention will be paid to the protection of women and children and to protracted refugee situations.
• The Refugee Services Collaborative of Greater Cleveland inaugural 2019 RSC Conference, Great Lakes Conference on Refugee Resilience and Integration: Promising Practices, Emerging Trends will take place November 14 and 15, 2019 in Cleveland, Ohio. This conference will highlight and deepen the dialogue on critical issues in the United States refugee community and serve as a catalyst to move forward best practices, addressing, but not limited to, root causes of refugee displacement, challenges facing the integration of vulnerable refugee communities, and emerging solutions underway across the nation.

ANNOUNCEMENTS   |   EVENTS   |   FUNDING   |   RESOURCES   |   BACK TO TOP

FUNDING

ANNOUNCEMENTS   |   EVENTS   |   FUNDING   |   RESOURCES   |   BACK TO TOP

RESOURCES

General Cultural Competency & Migration & Resettlement Awareness

• “Horrors I Will Never Forget”: The Stories of Rohingya Children, from Save the Children, is a collection of testimonies from children that made the journey from Myanmar into Bangladesh. Almost every child witnessed a family member or someone from their community killed. Others told of being caught up in atrocities, witnessing massacres or being taken away to be raped. Their testimonies corroborate violations documented by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
• “Suffer the Little Children to Come: The Legal Rights of Unaccompanied Alien Children under United States Federal Court Jurisprudence”, from the International Journal of Refugee Law, analyses United States (US) federal court jurisprudence to determine the legal rights of unaccompanied alien children (UAC) in various stages of immigration enforcement proceedings. After briefly discussing statistics on UAC in the US, it explains the legal context of US laws governing unaccompanied minors. (Description from source)

For Refugee/Immigrant Children & Youth

• Carmela Full of Wishes is about a young girls dream for her father’s papers to be fixed so he can finally come home. Recommended for grades PreK-3.
• The Arrival, a graphic novel, captures the strangeness of the immigrant experience without the use of words. Recommended for grades 7-9. (Description from source)

Cultural Orientation/Integration

• Delivering Interactive One-on-One CO, an e-learning module from CORE, will provide lessons aimed at enhancing your CO, including further application of adult learning principles and student-centered learning in different contexts. (Description from source)
• Financial Literacy Spotlight: Savings, from Higher, includes links to financial literacy tools and resources that may supplement cultural orientation sessions.
• Real People, True Stories Refugees for More Inclusive Societies, a discussion paper from Friends of Europe, includes recommendations from refugees themselves on how to make societies more inclusive.

Child Welfare/Families

• “Outcomes for Youth Served by the Unaccompanied Refugee Minor Foster Care Program: A Pilot Study”, from Child Welfare, shows results from a cross-sectional, descriptive pilot study in the domains of education, employment, health, mental health, risky behaviors, and social connections. (Description from source)
• The Changing Brain: Created to Heal Hope for Vulnerable Children and Their Caregivers, from the Christian Alliance for Orphans (CAFO), was created for those who care for and about orphans and vulnerable children (OVC), with the aim of helping them empower and equip children and youth toward success and well-being. It may be helpful for caregivers, social workers, teachers, leaders in OVC-serving organizations, mentors, clinicians, and church leaders who seek to tailor their ministries in ways that benefit all children.
• Strengthening Child Welfare Practice for Immigrant Children & Families: A Toolkit for Child Welfare Professionals in California, co-authored by National Center for Youth Law (NCYL) and Immigrant Legal Resource Center (IRLC), aims to to provide guidance to child welfare agencies in California working with immigrant children and families.

Early Childhood

• Leveraging the Potential of Home Visiting Programs to Serve Immigrant and Dual Language Learner Families, a policy brief from the Migration Policy Institute’s National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy (MPI/NCIIP), examines the characteristics of immigrant and DLL children and home visiting programs, as well as the barriers that impede participation and opportunities to mitigate them. An archived webinar discussing these findings and exploring opportunities to improve home visiting services is also available.

Education

• Preparing Your Classroom for Bilingual Students, from Language Lizard, reminds teachers to consider the needs of their bilingual students as they prepare their classrooms for the new school year. There are also resources for hosting a Parents Night event just for bilingual families, bringing the classroom together as a community, accommodating ELLs, and free lesson plans to promote social and emotional well-being.
• What Makes a Great Language-Rich Classroom?, a helpful checklist from the English Language Portal, will guide school personnel through some simple activities, routines, and setups they can establish to create an academic language-rich environment for English learners. (Description from source)
• Education as Healing: Addressing the Trauma of Displacement through Social and Emotional Learning, from UNESCO, tackles the educational challenge of trauma, a condition experience by some school-age migrant and refugee children, whose overall number has grown by 26% since 2000.
• Legal Protections for K-12 English Learner and Immigrant-Background Students, from the Migration Policy Network (MPI), lays out seven key ways the U.S. government protects the educational rights of EL and immigrant-background students, including those with Limited English Proficient and unauthorized-immigrant family members. (Description from source)

Youth

• Refugee Youth Mentoring – Essential Elements for Effective Programs, an information guide from Switchboard, offers existing evidence on youth mentoring and steps for designing an effective youth mentoring program. A supplemental archived webinar is also available.
• “’We Are All Confident To Speak’: Using Radio as a Tool Of Resettlement for Young People of Refugee Background”, from the Journal of Alternative and Community Media, discusses the ways community media production can be utilised to investigate solutions to the resettlement challenges faced by young people of refugee background. The findings suggest that participation in community media can have a beneficial effect on a young person’s settlement experience, in line with perceptions of what constitutes ‘successful’ resettlement. (Description from source)

Health/Mental Health

• “There Is No One Here to Protect You”: Trauma Among Children Fleeing Violence in Central America, from Physicians for Human Rights, is based on forensic evaluations of 183 individuals age 18 or under conducted by PHR’s Asylum Network, a national network of expert volunteer clinicians who evaluate individual cases of physical and psychological trauma from torture or persecution experienced by asylum seekers involved in U.S. immigration proceedings. The report’s findings identify the features of an escalating child rights crisis, from persecution in countries of origin to compounding trauma experienced by the children while in transit and at the U.S.-Mexico border. (Description from source)
• Mental Health Referral and New Provider Inquiry Forms, from Switchboard, are designed for refugee service providers to use in collaboration with mental healthcare providers as they work to build a culturally informed referral network.
• Family, Community Bonds Help Decrease Mental Health Problems of Former Child Soldiers, a study from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), documents transition to adulthood of Sierra Leone’s child soldiers. The study shows that increasing social and family acceptance while reducing stigma are important components of interventions to help former child soldiers adapt to post-conflict life.
• Access to Mental Health Services for Refugees in the U.S.: Overcoming Barriers and Strengthening Enabling Factors, a information guide from Switchboard, shares the findings of an original literature review on the topic of refugee access to mental health services. It summarizes what the research says about barriers and enablers and recommends practical steps for addressing them. A supplemental archived webinar presenting these findings is also available.

Anti-Trafficking

• Two-Generation/Whole Family Approaches in Anti-Trafficking Programming, an archived webinar from the National Human Trafficking Training and Technical Assistance Center (NHTTAC), discusses two-generation and whole family approaches, emerging trends, case studies, and best practices for providing supportive and comprehensive services for individuals who have experienced trafficking and their families.

• Migrant Women and Human Trafficking: Handbook for Professionals, from La Strada Czech Republic, LEFÖ-IBF, and Ban Ying, was prepared to raise awareness of the complex life and working conditions of migrant women who are at risk of or survivors of human trafficking. It further provides a practical tool for professionals interacting with this target group, especially regarding outreach work, identification and further support of those concerned. (Description from source)

Program Development

• 8 Tips for Using Logic Models to Improve Project Design and Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E), from the Monitoring and Evaluation Technical Assistance (META) Project, provides an overview of logic models, clarifying the purpose of and relationship between theories of change and logframes. It provides recommendations for improving your project design, planning for M&E from the start, considering the resources required, and more. Download the accompanying case study to see how logic models helped the staff of a fictional asset-purchase project ensure that their project was based on sound logic and that they could clearly measure their performance. (Description from source)
• Guiding Principles for Successful Data Sharing Agreements, from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), discusses the challenge of obtaining data sharing agreements which are critical to conducting research in education, and shares tips for establishing data sharing agreements.