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New York Jewish Week by way of JTA — 5 years in the past, Norma Batiz Martinez arrived in New York from Honduras, the place an increase in crime was making it too harmful for her and her children to stay. Batiz and her youngsters had crossed via Mexico, enduring starvation, chilly and fatigue.
However their struggles hardly ended once they made it to the USA, in search of refuge. She didn’t know the language, didn’t have a job or a driver’s license, and most of all, she didn’t even know the correct inquiries to ask or the way to get began.
“The method was very tough,” Batiz informed the New York Jewish Week, in Spanish. “If you arrive on this nation, not talking the language, there’s a lot info you miss. It’s laborious to entry the assistance that town provides. You may apply to every thing [social services] now, however one doesn’t know what one doesn’t know.”
“It is extremely vital,” she added, “for one to have that particular person they’ll lean on to have the ability to entry every thing.”
Batiz discovered “that particular person” via the New Neighbors Partnership, a nonprofit group that matches newly arrived refugee, asylee and asylum-seeking households with native New York-area households whose children are barely older. These volunteer native households move alongside their youngsters’s outgrown clothes to their associate households a couple of times a 12 months.
This system is very useful for households arriving from hotter climates. As Batiz herself famous, “it’s too chilly in New York.”
Oftentimes, these native households change into extra than simply sources for clothes. They change into pleasant faces in a brand new nation and help in navigating social providers and public college programs.
The New Neighbors Partnership was based by Shoshana Akabas practically 4 years in the past. The group acquired official 501(c)(3) standing within the spring, and since then, Akabas has been in a position to “match” extra native households with refugee households, who lately have arrived principally from Afghanistan. Previous to the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, nonetheless, they’ve arrived predominantly from Latin America and Africa.
“It’s like a dream job,” Akabas, 29, informed The New York Jewish Week. “I get to fulfill folks from all world wide and assist welcome them to a metropolis that I really like.”
Akabas’ curiosity in working with refugees started when she was an undergrad on the College of Pennsylvania, the place she volunteered at HIAS, the venerable Jewish immigrant assist society. After she moved again to New York — Akabas grew up on the Higher West Facet and attended Beit Rabban Day Faculty and Stuyvesant Excessive Faculty — she continued working with refugees and immigrants via volunteer work at her synagogue, B’nai Jeshurun on the Higher West Facet.
By this work, Akabas found many issues inside the current clothing-drive framework — particularly, they’re usually nameless, inefficient and time-consuming. Donations are thrown in a pile as an alternative of curated to suit the wants of the recipients. And who has time to solicit donations, run a drive and set up the place the donations will go?
She additionally discovered that hundreds of refugees arrive in New York yearly with inadequate clothes for chilly climate, significantly for quickly rising infants and kids. In accordance with Akabas, refugee businesses are usually contracted to supply assist for under three months and usually focus most of that point on discovering jobs, housing and faculties for brand spanking new households.
However Akabas stumbled into an answer to the clothes downside when she met a pregnant lady from Afghanistan who had lately arrived in the USA together with her husband, a translator for US troops. Desirous to lend a serving to hand, Akabas requested one in every of her buddies who had given delivery a couple of months earlier if she had any hand-me-down new child garments and child provides she may donate to the couple. She did.
Six months later, Akabas’ good friend had extra garments that her child had grown out of, so she handed these alongside subsequent. Akabas quickly realized how handy it was for either side of the chain to be matched instantly, in partnership. She now asks volunteer households to commit for 3 years. These first two moms are nonetheless linked.
This was the primary pairing in what has change into the New Neighbors Partnership, which has now created over 300 partnerships and has supplied greater than a thousand clothes packages to refugee households. There are at the least 200 New York Metropolis-based households on a ready checklist to be linked with refugee households, lots of whom are on army bases ready to get resettled after fleeing Afghanistan this summer time.
Across the identical time, Akabas give up her job instructing writing at Columbia College — the place she acquired her MFA — to work full time because the New Neighbors Partnership’s full-time govt director.
“We’re positively making an attempt to develop as sustainably and responsibly as potential,” Akabas stated.
The service, she defined, depends upon realizing the refugee households nicely as a way to greatest meet their wants. Volunteers are conscious, for instance, if their associate households are non secular Muslims, which normally means they like extra modest clothes. They’re additionally conscious if a single mom is elevating a household, in order that nobody donates a onesie that claims “My Daddy Loves Me.”
For now, along with Akabas, the group has three workers members, all of whom are refugees and contributors in this system themselves.
Akabas strongly believes her Jewish upbringing performed a task in founding the nonprofit. She feels an obligation to welcome strangers.
“I feel if I needed to level again to the place a lot of this [community engagement work] comes from, it’s from what we did at Beit Rabban,” she stated.
“We as a folks have been pressured to flee many, many occasions,” she added. “It’s one thing we all know nicely and understand how tough it’s.”
The advantages go each methods. For native mom Renee Rachelle, one in every of her greatest recollections through the COVID lockdown of spring 2020 was visiting the mom she was matched with from Kyrgyzstan. Rachelle drove from her dwelling on the Higher West Facet to Brooklyn to ship a bundle of garments and books, and to catch up within the entrance yard.
“Simply to see a well-recognized face and have no matter contact passing between us was very nice,” she informed The New York Jewish Week. “It’s widening my group a lot.”
One other native participant and member of the group’s board of administrators, Holly Schechter, agreed.
“New York is a kind of humorous locations the place it’s so huge, however may also be so small,” she stated. “This [partnership] in a roundabout way makes it really feel slightly smaller, or slightly extra inviting to people who find themselves new right here.”
“These [local] households have been there, collaborating with me, asking me what the kids want, how they’re doing, in the event that they can assist with daycare or buying vaccines,” Batiz stated. Her household has additionally helped her discover an English class.
With the New Neighbors Partnership, Akabas hopes to shift hearts and minds away from charity — usually a one-time, impersonal donation — and towards a community-based system of sharing and assist.
“Figuring out a household is behind you throughout your tough resettlement course of provides big worth,” she stated. “It’s far more significant than going to a resettlement company and selecting up nameless clothes articles which have been donated.”
Batiz was lately granted authorized immigration standing in the USA, a reduction after a lot uncertainty and insecurity over the previous couple of years. She hopes to ultimately transfer together with her household out of town to someplace the place she will purchase a home, very similar to the one she left behind in Honduras. For now, she is saving for her youngsters’s schooling, and getting used to New York winters. The 18 packages of clothes she’s acquired from her associate household since they have been linked in July 2020 are serving to her do exactly that.
“In Jewish teachings, we’re usually taught that nameless giving is a excessive type of giving,” Akabas stated. “However I feel there’s additionally room for a non-anonymous type of giving that maintains the dignity of all group members. And I’d prefer to suppose that our program does that.”
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