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SPECIAL FEATURE:

Promising Practices
for Refugee-Serving Programs

In this month’s Sidebar Series on “Promising Practices,” BRYCS highlights three innovative examples of child care programming provided either by or in collaboration with resettlement agencies in three areas of the country. As noted in this month’s spotlight article, a range of formal child care options may be available, but they are not always accessible to refugee families. Barriers to formal child care for refugees include lack of knowledge about child care options, cost, paper work, transportation, and a serious discomfort with leaving their children in the care of a stranger. The programs featured this month increase access to child care by helping ease the transition to formal care for both refugee children and their parents, with impressive results.

The Appleseed Learning Center (ALC) is the child care program of a for-profit agency in Cleveland, Ohio. This agency was approached by Catholic Charities’ Migration and Refugee Services in Cleveland and asked to serve Somali Bantu children while their parents attended ESL and job training. The program has since hired a Somali Bantu refugee as a daycare staff member, provides interpretation for families in Maay Maay, and currently serves 15 Somali Bantu children, who make up 25% of their total enrollment. The cost of these children’s daycare is subsidized through Cuyahoga County childcare vouchers. See their Program Description for more details.

The Catholic Social Services’ Resettlement Office (CSS-RO) of Charlotte, North Carolina assists refugee parents with the placement of their children in the local Head Start program. CSS-RO staff successfully advocated for priority placement for refugee children in Head Start, and support parents by helping with the required paper work, orientation, interpretation, transportation, and accompaniment to Teacher/Parent conferences. This year, the program expects to serve 19 refugee children from a broad range of countries. See their Program Description for more details.

Catholic Charities of Buffalo, New York (CC Buffalo) has developed a transitional childcare facility for their refugee parents while they attend ESL classes. This program helps refugee parents become familiar with the structure and routines of formal child care in a setting that allows ongoing observation and regular interaction between parents and children. This Transitional Childcare Center has made a noticeable difference for refugee families, facilitating their adjustment to formal child care, Head Start and Even Start Family Literacy programs. See their Program Description for more details.

BRYCS will continue to develop our “promising practices” series in the coming months as we share the innovative work being accomplished by programs serving refugee children and their families throughout the United States. Please be sure to visit BRYCS' Targeted Resources for Program Managers, where you will find a link to the complete list of Program Descriptions in the Clearinghouse.

If you have a program to share, or are aware of any creative efforts towards enhancing services for refugee children, please contact BRYCS with the details. We want to recognize and profile these efforts, so that others can learn from them. We are also interested in hearing from you about what tools, resources or mechanisms that you would like to learn more about. Email clearinghouse at brycs.org or call 202-541-3232 to speak with our Outreach and Information Coordinator.  You may also submit your program using our Web form.
 

Bridging Refugee Youth and Children’s Services (BRYCS) is a national technical assistance project working to broaden the scope of information and collaboration among service providers - in order to strengthen services to refugee youth, children and their families.

Read more about our mission and services.  Who is a refugee?

AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2006 SPOTLIGHT


Caring about Child Care for Refugee Families

In Fiscal Year 2005, 35% of all refugees admitted to the United States were below the age of 16—roughly 18,500 children.[1]

Any parent understands the complexity of finding adequate child care arrangements, and the anxiety of leaving one’s child with another caregiver. Refugee parents also face these hurdles, compounded by a lack of familiarity with U.S. child care norms and expectations, language barriers, and limited family and community systems on which to rely for help.

A new BRYCS curriculum, Enhancing Child Care for Refugee Self-Sufficiency, explores the child care issues facing refugee families. The curriculum combines useful descriptive information about the U.S. child care system, feedback from refugee serving agencies, practical recommendations for improving refugee access to child care, promising practice examples, and a sequence of training modules and handouts.

In researching this curriculum, BRYCS staff gathered feedback from 12 refugee serving agencies, as well as Child Care Resource and Referral (CCR&R) agencies in seven states. This first-hand information provides a unique perspective on the struggles faced by refugee families seeking child care and the strategies employed to find adequate care.

This month's Spotlight and featured search focus on the newest toolkit to be published by BRYCS. The featured search lists the most up-to-date and useful resources on this topic available for free download. Additional resources available free or for a fee can be found here.

Last month's Spotlight and featured search on Positive Youth Development with refugees and immigrants are available in the BRYCS archive.

1 - U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM), Office of Admissions, Refugee Processing Center (RPC), Fiscal Year 2005. “Refugee Arrivals by Relationship to Principal Applicant and Gender, Age, and Marital Status: Fiscal Year 2005.” USCIS Statistics Yearbook, available at: http://www.uscis.gov/graphics/shared/statistics/yearbook/2005/Table15.xls

BRYCS announces the publication of our new Toolkit/curriculum: Enhancing Child Care for Refugee Self-Sufficiency. This Toolkit was designed to assist refugee-serving agencies in dealing with child care issues facing refugees. The curriculum combines useful descriptive information about the U.S. child care system, feedback from refugee serving agencies, practical recommendations for improving refugee access to child care, promising practice examples, and a sequence of training modules and handouts.

Our previous Toolkits, Growing Up in a New Country: A Positive Youth Development Toolkit for Working with Refugees and Immigrants and Raising Children in a New Country: A Toolkit for Working with Refugee Parents are available in the BRYCS Clearinghouse and on CD-ROM. Please email clearinghouse@brycs.org or call 1-888-572-6500 (press #3 for the Clearinghouse) to request a free CD-ROM of the Toolkits.

WHAT'S NEW


   BRYCS at the Collaboration to AdoptUSKids National Adoption and Foster Care Summit, “Answering the Call: Extraordinary Services for Extraordinary Times - Recovery and Resilience.” Julianne Duncan and Lyn Morland presented a workshop entitled, “Reaching Excellence in Serving Migrating Children: Refugee, Trafficked and Undocumented Children in our Child Welfare Systems” at this meeting in San Antonio August 3-4. Their presentation provided background information and specific strategies for delivering culturally competent child welfare services to migrating children, including developing local support systems, recruiting ethnically similar foster families, addressing immigration status, facilitating international family reunification, and other innovative, promising practices. Click here to view a Power Point version of this presentation.

Almost 3,000 Burmese (mostly ethnic Karen) refugees have been approved for resettlement in the U.S., with about half arriving in Fiscal Year 2006 and the remainder in Fiscal Year 2007. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) has just released a profile on the Tham Hin Refugee camp in Thailand, which sheds light on the nature of persecution and flight for these Burmese refugees and includes such demographics as the professional and educational background of camp residents and the health and social make up of family units, unaccompanied minors and other at-risk refugees. See the IRC Report, OPE Thailand: Tham Hin Camp for more information.

Funding News

Youth Service America (YSA) and the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention are pleased to announce the launch of the YouthRising grant program. This opportunity offers $2,000 for organizations to engage high risk and/or gang-involved youth in volunteer service. Eligible organizations must have documented success in prevention/intervention work with high risk and/or gang-involved youth. [They] seek projects that are co-led by youth and adult allies such as parents, counselors, coaches, teachers, youth leaders, etc. A significant portion of the project must take place on National & Global Youth Service Day, April 20-22, 2007. Applications are due October 12, 2006. For more information and the application package, click here. (description taken from the YSA Web Site)

The Foundation for Child Development (FCD) Young Scholars Program provides approximately four fellowships of up to $150,000 each over a maximum period of three years to study issues affecting the development of young immigrant children in the United States. FCD is particularly interested in research that can inform policies regarding the health and education needs of young newcomer children. Applications are due November 1, 2006. For more information and application package, click here. (description taken from the FCD Web Site)

  Events

Adolescence and the Transition to Adulthood, October 18-19, in Chicago, is a conference hosted by Chapin Hall’s Center for Children. This conference will consist of six in-depth panel discussions on young adults with health, mental health, and special education needs, immigrant youth, and youth involved with the criminal justice and child welfare systems. Click here to register. (description taken from the Chapin Hall conference registration Web site)

The 10th Annual Healthy Communities, Healthy Youth Conference: Asset Building Comes of Age: Transforming Society with Youth, October 26-29, in Minneapolis is hosted by the Search Institute. Designed for people who work with or care about youth, this Conference brings together people of different backgrounds, nationally and internationally, who share a common goal: to work together to create healthy communities for children and youth through asset building. (description taken from the Conference Registration Booklet)

  Child Welfare

The California Evidence-Based Clearinghouse for Child Welfare (CEBC) Web site is designed to: serve as an online connection for child welfare professionals, staff of public and private organizations, academic institutions, and others who are committed to serving children and families; and provide up-to-date information on evidence-based child welfare practices. (description taken from the CEBC Web Site)

Reframing Child Abuse and Neglect: A Practical Toolkit, produced by Prevent Child Abuse America (PCA America) for FRIENDS, this tool kit shares the research findings and recommendations from PCA America’s 2003 strategic frame analysis of child abuse and neglect prevention conducted by the FrameWorks Institute. (description taken from the Toolkit Web Site)

Community Partnerships Offer a Means for Changing Frontline Child Welfare Practice, from the Center for Community Partnerships in Child Welfare, highlights a number of supports and other information on key "nuts and bolts" infrastructure elements that are necessary for child welfare agencies to effectively move a community partnership vision from theory to practice. (description taken from source)

  New Research

Parenting Partnerships in Culturally Diverse Child Care Settings: A Care Provider Perspective, from the Australian Institute of Family Studies, focuses on the manner in which carers in family and day care centers liaise and work with parents to understand perspectives on child-rearing versus their own practices and perspectives, and how these differences are managed. (description taken from the Diversity Health Institute Clearinghouse)

Learning to Listen through Home Visits with Somali, Mien, Cambodian, Vietnamese and Latino Families, from New Horizons for Learning, describes a summer learning experience that helped educational leaders listen to and learn from underrepresented voices. 24 doctoral students from the University of Washington visited the homes of Somali, Mien, Cambodian, Vietnamese, and Latino families living in a Seattle-area school community. Through the visits, the leadership students sought to understand how members of linguistic minority communities respond to policy decisions such as school closures. (description taken from source)

  Program Development

Youth Worker News: Serving All Youth: Youth Organizations and Immigrant Youth, from the National Collaboration for Youth - "This edition of Youth Worker News includes program resources to assist you in your work with immigrant youth." (description taken from the National Youth Development Information Center Web site)

  Tools

Your Growing Child – A Family Brochure, from the MN Department of Human Services, offers helpful tips on health, feeding, development, immunizations, safety and other age-appropriate information about your child. Booklets are also available in Arabic, Hmong, Khmer, Lao, Oromo, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Somali, Spanish and Vietnamese. (description taken from the Minnesota Department of Human Services Web Site)

Model Truancy Prevention Programs, from the American Bar Association (ABA) Criminal Justice Section and its Juvenile Justice Committee, briefly describes constructive approaches to truancy intervention from Atlanta and other locales across the U. S. as reported by members. (description taken from source)

COMING SOON: 

BRYCS will be publishing a child welfare manual and training guide for orienting refugee families to the U.S. child welfare system. Look for this guide on the BRYCS Web site starting September 29!

 
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