In case you haven’t picked up on this yet, youth and children are a core focus area of Canopy’s Long Welcome plan. We’re right in the middle of hiring a full-time Youth Services Coordinator and suffice it to say, they should have no problem keeping busy! The person in this position will be helping with academics, extra-curricular activities, post-high school readiness, and coordination between parents and the local school systems.
And that’s just the beginning.
We have also convened a Youth and Children Advisory Committee to help us continually identify new needs and areas of focus and we’re prepared to really invest in this in the next 3 years.
But why? After all, the way our government partners measure success is by how the parents are doing: whether they’re employed, how well they are learning English, if they know how to navigate community systems and are integrating into our community…So shouldn’t all our resources be going to parents? Why invest in youth and kids?
We have a few important reasons we believe this investment is a necessary imperative:
1. Parents can’t thrive if their kids aren’t thriving.
It’s hard to ask parents to attend English classes on the weekends when they know that means their kids will be home alone, and parents have a hard time focusing at work if they’re worried that their kids might be getting into trouble at school. Inversely, when kids are healthy and supported, they’re able to help and support their parents themselves. A paper published by the Migration Policy Institute last year argued that “addressing the needs of children is key to the success of parents, and that strong supportive families will promote better outcomes for children.” They found that organizations that prioritized a two-generational approach to refugee integration saw the strongest results for all family members.
And that brings us to our second argument:
2. An investment in youth is an investment in the whole family.
Our vision is to see refugees thrive: that means refugee kids and parents as individuals and refugee families as a whole too. And we heard this repeatedly in our client interviews throughout our research for our Long Welcome Plan. When we asked our clients to describe what it would look like for them to thrive here, they always talked about their kids. We went into these interviews expecting our clients to tell us about their need for English classes, financial literacy, career advancement—and they did talk about those some—but they kept coming back to their kids. In order for their family to thrive, they needed support as parents to help their kids thrive.
And ultimately, we learned that:
3. Youth are their parents’ American Dreams.
Many of our refugee parents don’t have grand visions of what thriving looks like for them personally. When we pressed them, they often told us: “We just want our kids to be able to do anything they want to do—that’s our dream.” And in reality, that’s always been true. Across the history of immigration and resettlement in the US, we see that often, it’s only in the second generation that the American Dream is fully realized for many immigrant families. So why invest in youth? Because we want them to thrive Because we want their parents and families to thrive And because they’ll be the ones to achieve the full potential that their parents brought to this country.
We’re so excited to get started. To learn more about our Long Welcome Plan, click here and stay tuned for updates on our Youth and Children’s Services!
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