In 2004, the Colorado Trust launched 10 boats upon the tricky and still largely unexplored waters of immigrant integration. Tricky because immigrant integration doesn’t just call for immigrants to adapt to their new communitylearn English, obey our laws — but for the community to adapt to them.
It asks native-born residents and homegrown institutions to better understand and incorporate the strengths of immigrant cultures. It’s a funeral director meeting with a Somali leader to learn about burial customs. It’s a police chief taking an exercise class with Latinas and police officers coaching soccer teams of immigrant youth to ease their fears of law enforcement. (And, yes, all these things happened.)
So, newcomer among us, learn English, but don’t give up Spanish or Somali or Nepali. Follow our cultural norms, but don’t relinquish the customs that can enrich an entire community.
The Colorado Trust calls it “a two-way street.”
The 10 boats were immigrant integration projects, all seeded and funded by the Colorado Trust, with assistance from the Spring Institute for Intercultural Learning. The projects were launched in 10 communities statewide. All were collaborations of native and immigrant born that included key institutions — schools, police, health care, social services.
The Trust didn’t set out to launch immigrant integration projects. In 2000, it started funding existing organizations that served immigrants, but its leadership saw that the communities receiving immigrants needed help. Places like Littleton and Fort Morgan have seen explosive growth in their immigrant and refugee populations.
“Refugees were resettled elsewhere but started moving to Fort Morgan to work in the meatpacking plants,” says Brenda Zion, executive director of OneMorgan County, which received one of the grants. “They first started coming in 2007 and now there’s 1,200 to 1,500 refugees here. That’s a 10 percent population boom for our area. Putting aside for a moment the cultural issues, what does just the sheer number mean to a community?”
The Colorado Trust gave five-year grants totaling more than $300,000 to each of the 10 projects the first year and to nine new collaborations the following. Funding has expired for the first group, but their work continues in various forms. Many projects involved helping immigrants learn English, become citizens and navigate various bureaucracies, as well as bringing together native and foreign-born in forums, dialogues and cultural events.
Last week, OneMorgan brought representatives of Lutheran Family Services, a refugee resettlement agency, to talk with city and county leaders about the Somali people who have come to the area. “You heard questions like, ‘How does resettlement work? How do they end up in Fort Morgan? How many more might come?’ ” Zion says. “It takes the mystery out of it.”
It’s rewarding but complex work. A just-released evaluation of the first grant recipients found that almost as soon as their work began it threatened to become mired in the politics of immigration reform. The Trust prohibited grant recipients from engaging in advocacy work, so they walked fine lines, knowing it’s impossible to accomplish widespread, lasting immigrant integration when a significant portion of their communities lack legal authorization to be here.
The concept of immigrant integration itself is not without its critics. Natives have no problem with immigrants adapting to our ways. It’s how we’ve always done business. But some balk against the latter half of the equation — global society be damned.
“(But) it’s not about that we have to abandon we are or they have to abandon who they are,” says Gurudev Khalsa, longtime facilitator and current director of the project for the Spring Institute. “It’s about taking advantage of the fact that we have rich cultures coming together.”
Last Friday, grant recipients gathered to mark the progress made over the last decade. Many had a story that reaffirmed for them the need for this work. Necessity exists not solely because immigrant integration bridges the differences between immigrant and native, but because it serves as a reminder of all we share.
Tina Griego writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com
