In San Diego, Refugee Leaders Find Success Together
Bread and Faith / Outreach through Bread
There are only two markets that sell injera bread in all of San Diego County. An important staple food for the Ethiopian and Eritrean community, this tangy, sponge-like flatbread is served for practically every meal, alongside flavorful spiced meat and vegetable dishes. So, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck California, the Refugee Assistance Center saw injera as an opportunity to reach its community members. Using their personal relationships with the two stores’ owners, staff set up tables in the markets to inform people about COVID-19 prevention, vaccine information, and assistance programs.
“That's how they reached 100% of the Ethiopian community—through bread,” recalls Valerie Nash, senior development consultant to the San Diego Refugee Communities Coalition. “No one else would've known that would be the way. The county would never have known that, a big organization would never have known that. The owner of those markets would never have said yes to anybody else.”
The Refugee Assistance Center is part of the San Diego Refugee Communities Coalition (SDRCC), a collective of ethnic community-based organizations (ECBOs). ECBOs are led by current and former refugees and immigrants, primarily for the advancement of refugees. As a result, staff of ECBOs create deeply connected relationships as they serve members in their community while living in the same neighborhoods, worshipping in the same mosques and churches, and shopping at the same stores.
Trauma-informed outreach & flexible funding
Refugee families, even during non-pandemic times, typically experience immense hardship and upheaval prior to arriving in the United States, whether they are fleeing violence or desperate for opportunity. Upon arriving in a new country, refugees face new and unique challenges including starting over in an unfamiliar place, where they often cannot speak the language and do not understand the culture.
Refugee communities need supports that are designed to help address these specific challenges and stressors. Having experienced their own immigration and refugee journeys, the leaders of the SDRCC know that their communities respond best to addressing families’ basic needs and personalized relationship-building. Through this work, ECBO leaders and staff establish trust and foster a sense of safety.
Using their expertise, ECBOs find ways to connect with their communities through strategies that make the most sense for their priority populations. For instance, the Haitian community health workers (CHWs) of the Haitian Bridge Alliance do more in-person outreach in trusted spaces, rather than digital communications or marketing, because of the community’s hesitancy towards technology. On the contrary, Karen and Burmese CHWs use Facebook Live to educate members because the application is quite popular in their community, as it is the main way to connect with relatives and friends in the refugee camps in Burma.
With flexible funding from Together Toward Health, the SDRCC is able to build trust by supporting their community members in meeting critical needs, including, business coaching, and childcare supplies. Community health workers help people in various ways, from getting their driver's license to navigating the immigration system.
“As ethnic community-based organizations, we serve our communities holistically, regardless of the need,” says Amina Sheik Mohamed, Founding Director of the Refugee Health Unit. “This is why the flexibility of these grants have been so critical for us, because when our people come to us for help, we will never say it’s not in our scope of work.”
The joys and benefits of a true coalition
The collaborative model of the coalition, which was strengthened through funding, has been a game-changer for these 12 small ethnic community-based organizations. The group is in constant communication, meeting weekly or daily to share expertise, opportunities, and challenges in one central place. By pooling together resources and knowledge, the groups are able to effectively come up with solutions in real time. They collaborate on a weekly newsletter, which shares a message of the week aimed to prevent misinformation and inform the community. The newsletter is then customized and disseminated in slightly different ways by the partners, including translation into different languages and changing images to better relate to specific groups. For small organizations with limited capacity, the ability to work together and tap into shared expertise is invaluable.
For example, the latest round of TTH funding enabled the coalition to bring in an Afghan-serving ECBO, which will be focused on reaching out and providing vaccinations to incoming refugees from Afghanistan. The Deputy Director of that organization, Mumtaz Momand, commented that in addition to funding, the organization also received crucial operational support from fellow leaders at the coalition, including payroll support from Nao Kabashima (Executive Director of Karen Organization of San Diego), board management tips from Abdi Mohamoud (Executive Director of Horn of Africa), and guidance on the opening of his new community center from Chuol Tut (Executive Director of the Southern Sudanese Community Center).
Coalition members have described the personal and professional support that they have gained from one another as transformative. Nao Kabashima of Karen Organization shared how the coalition gave her strength when she became a new mother at the start of the pandemic: “At the time, I was really struggling and scared. But then the leaders of the other ECBOs started to call me to talk about what we were going to do together to tackle the pandemic,” she said. “Without that support, I would’ve felt so lost, I would’ve been so burned out. This group really helped me get through.”
Looking Forward
Despite the challenges and disparities exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the San Diego Refugee Communities Coalition is stronger than ever. Adapting together, San Diego’s ECBOs have built a deep trust with their communities and provided thousands of refugees and immigrants with the holistic support they need, as well as vital COVID-19 information, testing, and vaccinations. “I think other organizations, other cities, all over the state can use this collective way of working.” Nao Kabashima says, “We need this kind of collective approach to build the capacity of smaller community-based organizations and amplify the voices of the refugee community.”
