Relief | Development | Advocacy

Refugees who arrive in Spokane face unparalleled challenges in every arena of life: mental, physical, emotional, social, and spiritual. It takes most refugees many years to successfully work through all of their challenges, because when one is met, a new one usually arises. Global Neighborhood works to provide holistic care for refugees through relationship – for as long as it takes for them to become fully sustained. This holistic work comes in three forms: relief, development, and advocacy.

Relief work provides direct services and goods to refugees with immediate and pressing needs. Most of this work happens in the first one or two years of a refugee’s time in Spokane as they seek to establish themselves financially and have little access to sources of assistance.

Development work focuses on giving refugees the knowledge, skills, and tools necessary to become notonly self-sustaining, but leaders who contribute to their communities and to the city.

Advocacy concentrates on giving a voice to refugees, who are often a voiceless population in the city. Through it, we promote systemic change on the behalf of those who are not able to fight for it themselves.

Relief

When refugees first arrive in Spokane, they have many physical needs and very little means of meeting those needs themselves. They often come with only one bag of clothes and receive very little cash assistance from the government. They also have great social needs. A new city, new language, and new culture can often be so overwhelming that refugees go months or years before building meaningful friendships with the Americans around them. Global Neighborhood works to help meet these needs in a number of ways.

Volunteers

Volunteers are the hands and feet of Global Neighborhood. Our goal is to provide our services through the medium of caring relationships. Not only are our services administered through our network of volunteers, our volunteers themselves are fulfilling what is perhaps the greatest need in refugees’ lives – the need for friendship. Volunteers help teach English, sort mail, babysit, and give rides to appointments. They also drink a lot of tea and eat a lot of great ethnic food. Almost without fail our volunteers benefit from their new friendships at least as much as the refugees do. If you would like to learn more about volunteering with Global Neighborhood, please visit the “Volunteer” section of our website, or email our Director of Volunteers, Amy Hendricks, at: amy@global-neighborhood.org

Global Neighborhood Thrift: Low Cost Goods and Employment

Global Neighborhood has established an empowering means of distributing low-cost goods to refugees in Spokane through the development of a small business called Global Neighborhood Thrift. From clothing to household goods to furniture, Global Neighborhood Thrift helps alleviate some of the financial stress that refugees experience while they establish themselves in Spokane.

Global Neighborhood Thrift not only provides low-cost goods to the refugee and greater Spokane communities, but also works to employ refugees. While refugees have so much to contribute to our city, they are often at the bottom of the employment ladder. Without American job references, English language skills, or cultural fluency, refugees find it very difficult to gain employment. If they do happen upon a job, they often work in places where there is little to no chance for employment advancement. Being employed often also means that they have to stop their education due to conflicting schedules. Because of these issues, Global Neighborhood Thrift is working to employ, train, and empower refugees in Spokane. If you would like to make an in-kind donation or financial donation to Global Neighborhood Thrift, please check out the Global Neighborhood Thrift Website, or contact Ruth, Director of Physical Resources (ruth@global-neighborhood.org).

Development

Global Neighborhood does not seek merely to help refugees, but to empower them. There is a great difference between the two, but that difference is often overlooked. The famous proverb says, “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” This is quite true, and in our context could read, “Give a refugee a ride to work and she works for a day. Help a refugee get her driver’s license and she drives herself every day and feels much better about herself.” The goal of Global Neighborhood is to empower refugees to help themselves and others. We struggle against the subtle attitude of colonialism that is so pervasive in our society that encourages handouts as a means of asserting superiority over someone. Though helping refugees by empowering them is often more difficult and time consuming, the end results are people who are leaders rather than dependents. Global Neighborhood’s development programs include:

English Instruction

Knowing English is a need that pervades every area of most refugees’ lives. Not being able to speak English makes everything from riding the bus, to buying groceries, to getting a job incredibly difficult. It often leads to discrimination and exploitation as well as necessitating a dependence on others. Most refugees are enrolled in ESL classes through the Institute for Extended Learning upon their arrival. These classes provide a great foundation for refugees in their quest to learn English. However, a classroom format can only provide so much, and many refugees struggle to implement their schoolwork in their day-to-day lives. To fill this gap, Global Neighborhood provides one-on-one English tutoring to refugees. This happens through volunteers’ visits to refugees at their homes. We also provide one-on-one English assistance to refugee employees at Global Neighborhood Thrift and occasionally facilitate semester-long tutoring courses to assist refugees in their learning.

Small Business Development

Unemployment numbers are staggering in the refugee community in Spokane. Global Neighborhood is working to alleviate this problem. Many refugees in Spokane possess business, craft, medical, and construction skills, and we see the great potential in allowing them to use these gifts to make our city a better place. Through the support of our many partners and supporters, Global Neighborhood has been able to help and empower a number of refugees to start their own business and join in subsidiary businesses run by Global Neighborhood, the first of which is Global Neighborhood Thrift. Our volunteers have also aided refugees in starting a number of small businesses, including hair-weaving and housekeeping services.

Advocacy

Refugees, almost by definition, are a marginalized group of people. They are a people on the move, and are still in the process of making Spokane their home. As foreigners, they are often invisible or ignored. Being in such a position often leads to various forms of exploitation and injustice. Sometimes it is intentional, other times it is simply a result of a system that doesn’t acknowledge their existence. Global Neighborhood seeks to amplify and translate the voices of refugees in order that they may speak for themselves. We seek to advocate on their behalf when injustices threaten to keep them down. Here are a few ways this happens:

Legal Advocacy

– Refugees, coming from other countries with other rules, are presented with a huge learning curve when it comes to the law in Spokane.

Global Neighborhood partners with a variety of organizations and individuals around the city to provide basic instruction on legal issues to refugees. Things we take for granted, like not being able to bribe a police officer, are not obvious to people coming from corrupt societies. On occasion, refugees, like every other people group, get into trouble with the law. Most often it proves to be a grave injustice that has spiraled out of control simply because the refugee does not understand the issues or speak English well enough to explain him/herself. In such cases, Global Neighborhood does its best to support refugees in the legal system that they might not be taken advantage of.

Landlord/Tenant Issues

– Nearly every refugee lives in a rented apartment. Most landlords are upright citizens, but when this is not the case, Global Neighborhood works with refugees to make sure they understand their rights as renters and to help them stand up for themselves in cases where they are being exploited.

Systemic Change

– Legal systems are usually built by those in our society who have influence, money, and connections. Since refugees have none of these things, the laws that are in place often prove to be unjustly weighted against them. In such cases, Global Neighborhood works to stand up for refugees in the political sphere, realizing that not speaking out against injustice is the same as speaking out in favor of the status quo.

Community Education

– Global Neighborhood not only wants to give a voice to refugees so they can defend their rights, but wants to give refugees a chance to share their culture, wisdom, and insight with the people of Spokane. There are amazing people from all over the world living here in our city and very few people know it! Global Neighborhood is working with leaders from Spokane’s refugee communities to put on events where the people of Spokane can see, hear, taste, and experience the beauty of the cultures around them. If your organization or institution is interested in learning more about refugees, and would like us to provide a consultation or educational session with your agency, please contact Amy Hendricks, Director of Volunteers, amy@global-neighborhood.org.