By Lisa K. Schalla, CFLeads/Connecting Communities in the Americas
Since 2016, Connecting Communities in the Americas (CCA) has been supporting community foundations and their partners in learning about and engaging more closely with their transnational communities – immigrant or diaspora populations, families with loved ones who live abroad, emigrants who are returning to their places of origin, and migrants in transit.
Why should we care about migration in communities? We’ve learned that they are often less well connected to their local nonprofits and invisible in city and state data that would provide better access to essential resources. By creating more intentional connections to our migrant, immigrant and returning families we are helping to create a stronger ecosystem of resources and support. Here are four lessons of what we have learned in the past five years:
Like climate or gender, the migration experience is a transversal theme in the work that nonprofits do.
Fundación Comunitaria Malinalco, in Estado de México, had not dealt with migration as a specific topic until their mapping study in 2018, but through it, they realised that this experience intersects with all other areas of their work, just like women’s rights, environment, and youth leadership do. Practically every family in their municipality has a relative or neighbour who has lived abroad, is still there, or has recently returned. So, not to recognise the positive and negative impacts of migration is to ignore a critical aspect of a community’s economic, social, environmental and political vitality and wellbeing.
Building social capital doesn’t just connect people with resources – it highlights the strengths and contributions of each community.
Whether it is a recently arrived family from Venezuela, a mother and child in transit from Nicaragua, or a young man returning to his hometown in Mexico, each person experiencing migration has so much to offer and needs to be connected to a welcoming community and the resources necessary to function productively. Through CCA and other partners, Fundación Internacional de la Comunidad is building social capital by working with local shelters to connect women/child migrants to educational and health resources in Tijuana, Mexico. Meanwhile, in the United States, the Delaware Community Foundation has been having conversations with local Latina and Latino business owners about how they want to strengthen their internal capacities and give visibility, not only to their businesses, but also to how they are contributing to the area’s economy.
Building trusting relationships comes first.
Creating trusting relationships has been repeatedly identified as the most important first step in working with local immigrant, diaspora and migrant communities. In monthly grantee cohort meetings, colleagues across countries have shared their strategies for creating relationships with new communities – to be present as learners, not experts. As a staff member at Ayiti Community Trust shared, “we need to be authentic and willing to be vulnerable”. At Connecting Communities in the Americas, this also means deferring to the experience and expertise of our grantees, learning about how to best accommodate our grantmaking to their needs and providing more opportunities for them to share their experiences.
Partnering across the Americas can strengthen our local work.
In some cases, community foundations and their partners are helping to strengthen each other’s work. With the help of the Minneapolis Foundation, the Mexican-based foundation Comunidad has been able to connect with the diaspora population from Axochiapan, Morelos in Minnesota, who has been vital in establishing the Mercado Central and promoting their cultural traditions abroad. In another partnership, Corporativa de Fundaciones in Guadalajara, Mexico, is working with the Collaboratory in southern Florida on culturally relevant approaches for engagement and philanthropy with Mexican communities in the United States.
Meanwhile, we have been able to facilitate conversations between community foundations in Brazil, Canada and Mexico about using the Vital Signs as a tool for community engagement. Vital Signs is a community-driven data programme that has been used widely among Canadian community foundations to collect data on issues of interest, share them back with the wider community and engage in conversation about the best collaborative approaches across sectors to address these issues. Using Vital Signs can also help to bring light to the assets and needs of often `invisible’ groups like recently arrived immigrants or returning emigrants.
Conclusion
Viewing migration as a cross-cutting theme across programmes, building social capital and trust, and partnering to strengthen impact are all ways that community foundations and other nonprofits across the Americas are strengthening local ecosystems of support. This work has helped many foundations to connect with their immigrant, emigrant and diaspora communities in new ways and take specific actions toward a more just and equitable society. We welcome the participation of organisations from the WINGS network – especially those in the Americas – to join in the conversation and monthly Peer Resource Sharing through Connecting Communities in the Americas, to learn from each other’s experiences and find new opportunities for collaboration.
Lisa Schalla is the director of the Connecting Communities in the Americas initiative, which is housed at CFLeads and created to inspire and strengthen community foundations and their partners for local impact while addressing issues that transcend borders. Lisa is a former international educator with a doctorate in Educational Policy & Leadership from the University of Minnesota. She later directed Fundación Punta de Mita in Nayarit, Mexico, and served on the board of directors for Comunalia.