Creating pathways to new beginnings.

Dear Friend,

Welcome to our August newsletter, we hope that you have enjoyed these warm Summer months. As we share this newsletter, we are deeply concerned about the current crises taking place in Afghanistan and Haiti. We hope you were able to read our statement. If not, you can read the full statement here. We appreciate your support while we continue to advocate for Haitian and Afghan communities.

Read our full statement here

Our Solas Awards Celebration will be a virtual event you truly don’t want to miss! On November 9, 2021 gather with friends or family to virtually celebrate the immigrant & refugee community in Boston with special host from WGBH Boston, Jim Braude! We are honored to have a musical performance from Tolü Mackay, an independent artist, singer and songwriter born in Nigeria and raised in the midlands of Ireland!

Are you interested in empowering immigrant and refugee communities by ensuring access to vital services including Education, Immigration Legal Services, Resource & Support Services and international learning experiences? Sponsor Solas!

Sponsor Solas Here

Education Services Summer Courses!

It has been an exciting summer for our Education Service team! Director of Education Services and ESOL 1 instructor Rebecca Hale and teaching assistant Maddie McAloon held an in-person outdoor picnic for their beginner ESOL class at the Public Garden (pictured below)! This trip was a great way to see students and instructors safely in person, and they were able to enjoy home-cooked Afghani style rice and meat dishes. So fun!

This summer, our team is hosting ESOL conversation classes, which is a great way for students to get to practice their english skills in a less formal setting. Our turnout has been excellent, we had 42 students enroll in the summer conversation class! We look forward to continuing to host these classes in the coming months.

Celebrating Student Success!

One of our ESOL students who is also in our Individual Achievement Program recently passed an exam to become a volunteer at a nursing home near her home in Stoneham! This has been something she has been interested in doing for some time, as she said "If I can speak English better, I want to do more volunteer work." In addition to her volunteer work at the nursing home she also teaches the residents flower arranging as well as Korean, her native language. She is a ray of sunshine, brightening up the nursing home weekly - we are so happy that she has achieved one of her goals!

Community Partnership with Enroot

We are thrilled to expand our legal aid for immigrant youth! Rian is collaborating with Enroot to expand our work in Somerville and Cambridge. Enroot is a Cambridge-based nonprofit that provides mentoring and tutoring opportunities to high school and college students. Receiving immigration legal assistance and status enables immigrant youth and their families to access more educational and professional opportunities. We are honored to partner with Enroot and are extremely grateful to the Cabot Family Charitable Trust for making this happen!

Continuing to Support Irish Immigrants

We are deeply grateful to the Irish Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs Emigrant Support Program for presenting us with much appreciated support to continue supporting Irish immigrants in New England.

This support allows us to continue to provide immigration legal services, citizenship services, social services, individual counseling, job readiness programs, and support of young Irish students and graduates, who come to the U.S. to develop job skills, contribute to the economy, and gain the confidence to contribute to become future leaders in Ireland upon their return home!

Rian Immigrant Center staffing and anti-racism updates

It's been a busy couple of months since our new Director of People and Partnerships, Ilona Drew, joined our team! Ilona has been focusing on working with staff on creating HR policies and working to draft a phased Center Reopening Plan for the future. We are closely following public health guidelines and will respond accordingly, but we remain hopeful that the next year will bring the ability to re-open our physical doors in some capacity as Boston's Welcome Center for Immigrants and Refugees!

In staffing news, we are so sad to say goodbye to Lea Vugic, our Director of Resource and Support Services, who is pursuing a Doctorate in Social Work at Boston University this fall. Lea joined us in January 2020, and we cannot wait to follow her research and work in the future! Best of luck to Lea! We are excited to welcome our new Director of Resource and Support services, Sarah Bayer, to our team on September 7th! Sarah has been a clinical and macro social worker in the Boston metro area for over 20 years and has worked in community-based settings and health care centers with families experiencing homelessness. We look forward to her leading our Resource and Support Services team!

We are also delighted to welcome Jonah Hanh and Elena Ruiz to our center! Jonah worked at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center prior to starting his role as an Immigration Legal Services Program Associate this summer! Elena Ruiz will be moving into the role of Individual Achievement Program Manager and will join our center on September 7th. Welcome, Sarah, Jonah and Elena!

Rian has also spent the past year-plus focused on transforming our ideas, policies and practices in an effort to become a truly anti-racist organization. This summer, we began our work with the Anti-Racism Collaborative (ARC), who will help us complete an organizational assessment and develop an action plan to make meaningful organizational changes. . While this is a marathon, not a sprint, we are learning more and more each day about what it means to live our values and promote racial equity in all of our work.

Our president on the board of directors, Kevin Mawe, is running the Boston Marathon & raising funds for Rian Immigrant Center! Kevin is a longstanding supporter of our organization and we deeply appreciate his dedication to our community. Take a look at his fundraising page & consider sharing in your networks!

Support Kevin Mawe's Marathon Run for Rian!

The Rian Immigrant Center has recently supported the following bills & petitions:

Afghan Refugee Letter to POTUS
The Work and Mobility Act
Action to Support Immigrant Workers Disproportionately Impacted by Pandemic and Lockdowns
Student Loan Borrower Bill of Rights
Liberian Refugee Immigration Fairness Program
Impact of the Child Tax Credit on Immigrant and Migrant Survivors and their Families
Automatic Extension of DACA Employment Authorization Documents

In addition, this month the Department of Homeland Security re-designated TPS in Haiti for 18 months, which was an incredible victory for the Haitian community! Our center released a statement about the announcement - if you didn’t get the chance to read it, you can read it here!

We will continue to support advocacy efforts that affect the immigrant community. Are you interested in receiving email updates from us regarding our advocacy efforts? If so, please join our Advocacy list!

Join our Advocacy Mailing List Here!

Read our statement regarding Afghanistan & Haiti

Welcome to our Summer interns & volunteers!

We would like to extend a warm welcome to all of our new summer interns and volunteers, some of whom are pictured above at our virtual welcome orientation we held on July 6th. We truly could not do the work we do without the assistance and dedication of these incredible individuals!

Our volunteer and internship programs are an excellent way to give back to the community and are an enriching experience for those who are interested in non-profit work or policy advancement. You can view our internship and volunteer opportunities here - we update the positions as they become available!

Irish for Pride 2021

We were excited to partner with the Consul General of Ireland, Boston again this year for a virtual ‘Irish for Pride’ event, which took place in June and early July. We are committed to supporting the LGBTQIA+ community and we felt that it was important to come together again virtually this year. It was great to see people of all ages joining in the celebration at home, so we created a photo collage to share the celebration! Thank you to everyone for spreading the word and for joining in and showing your support. We look forward to hopefully being able to celebrate together in person in 2022!

You're invited to an outdoor Art Show!

A former client and long standing friend of the center, Thaer Abdallah, is hosting an outdoor art show exhibit at his home in Shrewsbury on September 18 and you are all invited to join! Thaer is an incredible artist who portrays his experiences as a Palestinian refugee in his oil and acrylic paintings. The event will include music and food!