Since 2017, Sandy Hassan has volunteered with her mosque, the West Cleveland Muslim Association (WCMA) in Westlake, helping community members, including newcomers to Cleveland, find jobs and housing.
In November, she started doing this type of work professionally and took on a new title: Newcomer Navigator for the Arab community. While creating a food program at the mosque during the pandemic, she worked with Melaak Rashid, the development director at refugee support nonprofit Smart Development, who later invited Hassan to join the Newcomer Navigators program.
Hassan had roots in the community years before Newcomer Navigators started, but she said the program gave her the tools to connect newcomers with the appropriate resources.
A collaboration among several community-based organizations, the Newcomer Navigators program employs about a dozen community members who work 10 hours a week connecting immigrants and refugees to employment and housing resources and other support services. Many of the navigators are immigrants and refugees themselves, and they serve seven newcomer communities: Afghan, Arab, Congolese, Somalian, Karen (Burmese), Ukrainian, and Spanish-speaking.
“We pay them to be kind of our eyes and ears in the community because they come from the communities we’re serving. So, oftentimes, they are the ones who residents will go to out of trust to discuss either opportunities or their hardships that they need resolution to,” Rashid said.
Newcomer-serving organizations are also supporting city-level efforts to welcome refugees and immigrants to Cleveland. With $45,000 in grant funding from the Refugee Response, the city of Cleveland is hiring a senior coordinator who will advocate for the needs of refugees and immigrants and serve as a liaison between government and community organizations that serve newcomers. The city is conducting final interviews with candidates, press secretary Marie Zickefoose told The Land in an email on Aug. 30.
A growing effort
Cuyahoga County is providing $507,000 over three years to fund the program, which is housed within the Refugee Response, a local nonprofit. Local consulting firm Rise Together helps manage the program, working with navigators from Smart Development and four other partner organizations: the Somali Bantu Community Corporation of Cleveland, the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) Cleveland, Nueva Luz Urban Resource Center, and Advocates for Peace and Change.
Since its launch in November 2022, the program has solely relied on word of mouth to reach the newcomer community. On Tuesday, Aug. 15, the program held a launch event with County Executive Chris Ronayne at the Refugee Response’s headquarters at 2054 W. 47th St.
The program set a goal of reaching 120 people in its first year, said Tanya Budler, founder of the consulting firm Rise Together. It served about 150 people in its first quarter and has now reached over 250 people, more than doubling its 2023 goal already.
The Newcomer Navigators program has limited capacity, and it’s determining how to scale up to meet the needs of immigrants and refugees, including housing, transportation, and language resources. The navigators embed themselves in the community and often work more than the 10 hours they get paid for, Budler said.
How navigators connect newcomers to resources and support
The navigators guide immigrants and refugees through the many details that come with settling in a new place, including finding a place to live, transportation, and a job.
Needs vary across immigrant and refugee communities, but common challenges include access to housing, transportation, well-paying jobs, and mental health resources, Budler said. Access to adult education and safe recreational programs are also major needs, said Patrick Kearns, executive director of the Refugee Response.
“What we’re talking about is sitting with a family and understanding all of their needs. Maybe helping them with some utility bills while helping them find a job that’s meaningful and higher paid so that they don’t have utility bill problems in the future,” Budler said.
Each Newcomer Navigator has deep knowledge about the particular community they serve, and they build trust within their community.
Hassan’s community is familiar with her because she’s been a member of her mosque’s social committee since she started volunteering there in 2017. Her parents are immigrants from Egypt, and she said her understanding of the challenges newcomers face motivated her to do this work.
She receives referrals from community members and Rashid, sometimes connecting with newcomers through a Facebook group as well. Then, Hassan, who speaks both English and Arabic, meets with each newcomer to understand their exact needs before collaborating with Rashid and Budler, to connect them with support and resources.
“The Newcomer Navigator basically seeks to help international newcomers to access different resources and to gain support in order to thrive in the community,” Hassan said.
Special events focus on individual newcomer communities
The Newcomer Navigators program holds “One Stop Shop” events, also known as “Newcomer Days,” to streamline the process of connecting to resources. Each event focuses on a particular community, such as Ukrainian, Congolese, or Arab-speaking newcomers. There have been three events so far.
County representatives, OhioMeansJobs, employers looking for workers, and translators and interpreters attend the events. Using feedback from the navigators, the events also bring together resources that cater to the specific needs of each newcomer community, Budler said. An event for the Congolese community, for example, included family support program Bright Beginnings and FamilySpace, a Cleveland Public Library program that provides designated play areas for families with children ages five and under.
“When we were speaking to our navigator and trying to understand what the Congolese community really needed, we realized there’s a significant amount of single mothers, and those mothers were looking for extra support and looking for things to do with their children,” Budler said. “And so it was because of that need that we went out and we sought county-level partners in that space.”
At a January event for the Ukrainian community, 10 families and 36 individuals enrolled in service programs, according to a newsletter from the Refugee Response. And at a May event attended by 63 Arab community families, newcomers received free phone services and help with Medicaid applications, Hassan said.
On Sept. 22, Newcomer Navigators is hosting an event for the Ukrainian community at Parma Heights Baptist Church. The team is working out the details for an additional event in October. Then, the West Cleveland Muslim Association in Westlake will hold an event for the Arab and Muslim community on Nov. 30, Budler said.
Partnerships in the community and in government
Rise Together and the other organizations involved in Newcomer Navigators help build connections with other agencies and organizations in the community, too, Budler said. The goal is to create shared resources that are accessible to newcomers.
“Communities and families have had to figure these things out themselves for so long, but there hasn’t been a collective sharing of resources, information, that kind of consolidated approach – so you’re not always having to recreate the wheel on similar problems or similar gaps in services,” said Kearns of the Refugee Response.
Smart Development has built relationships with business owners in the area, telling them about the needs of refugees and immigrants. The organization has compiled a list of business partners, including grocery stores, hotels, restaurants, and barber shops that notify Smart Development when they have job openings, said Rashid, the organization’s development director.
The Refugee Response, Smart Development, and several other newcomer-serving organizations in Cleveland are part of the Refugee Services Collaborative of Greater Cleveland, which brings organizations together with school districts and social service organizations.
Global Cleveland, an economic development nonprofit focused on welcoming international newcomers, is part of that collaborative as well. Like Smart Development team members, Global Cleveland’s workforce manager Evan Chwalek has reached out to employers in Cleveland to talk to them about hiring newcomers, he said.
The senior coordinator for new Clevelanders, the new city position funded by the Refugee Response, will work closely with the Refugee Services Collaborative, said Kearns, executive director of the Refugee Response.
“I think it’s the start,” Kearns said. “It’s not a magic wand. It’s not gonna change everything: all the issues and needs in the communities. But it’s a good first step. And it’s a way that our newcomer populations can see that the city is investing in the infrastructure and the support systems around these populations. Not just to say, ‘Welcome,’ but to say, ‘This can be a home, and this can be your future here.’”
Learn more about the Refugee Response here. Get in touch by emailing info@refugeeresponse.org or calling 216-236-3877. Reach Rise Together founder Tanya Budler at tanya@risetogethercle.com, and reach Melaak Rashid, development director at Smart Development at melaak.smartdevelopmentinc@gmail.com.
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