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Upcoming Events!
Spring is a busy
time of year in the world of immigration.
Citizenship ceremonies, job fairs, health
trainings and more are popping up like new
flowers. Here are a few events that the
Welcoming Center has its eye on:
- HIAS
and Council Migration Service and Nationalities
Service Center are co-sponsoring National
Citizenship Day! On Saturday, April 19th, from
10am to 4pm, trained lawyers will be available
to help in applying for citizenship for
free at Nationalities Service Center.
Clients must be pre-screened, so if you know of
someone, please make sure they call Vilma or
Laura at HIAS, 215-832-0900. Nationalities
Service Center is located at 1216 Arch Street on
the 4th Floor.
- Al
Dia and the Welcoming
Center are teaming up to organize a job
fair. Mark your calendars for Wednesday, May
28th at the Convention Center from 8am to 4pm.
There will be qualified job candidates ready to
work and employers ready to fill their staffing
needs. Contact
us if you are interested in participating.
- U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants
(USCRI) in partnership with Nationalities
Service Center will host a two-day training on
"How to Promote Healthy Eating and Living in
Refugee Communities." The training will take
place on Thursday, April 17th and Friday, April
18th from 8:30am to 4:30pm at Nationalities
Service Center, 1216 Arch Street on the 4th
floor. To register, please contact Tigist
Guebreyes (215) 893-8400, ext. 1524.
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A World of Difference
at South Philadelphia High  We were happy to welcome
Jerry Clark, of the Anti-Defamation League's World
of Difference Institute, and the Welcoming
Center's Fatimah Muhammad to conduct a peer
leadership training at South Philadelphia High
School. The three-day training brought together
11 immigrant students and 11 native-born
American students to recognize bias and
prejudice in their own environment and work to
reduce it. Students learned about the different
kinds of bias and ways to counteract it by
learning and practicing the methods of stepping
in to intervene when incidences of prejudice
occur.
The facilitators used many fun
scenarios and games to illustrate how people
formulate their identities and their biases. For
example, each student was given a lemon and was
told to write a story about the lemon -- where
it came from, its journey to where it is now,
etc. At the start of the exercise, each lemon
looked the same. By the end of the activity,
after the students had created a story for each
lemon, they were able to recognize the
differences among the lemons. It was a
reflective exercise about recognizing how our
own stories make us seemingly more different
than we really are.
Jen Chiu, the
Project Bridging Cultures Coordinator, was happy
to see the American and immigrant students
continue to interact in the weeks following the
training. The American-born participants are
regularly seen visiting the Bridging
Cultures classroom and interacting in the
hallways. We hope that this will be a small step
to lasting change in this community.
(Photo by Daphne31
{traveling}. Used with permission, via a
Creative Commons license.)
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Vocational Literacy
 Lately, the office at the
Welcoming Center seems to be buzzing a little
bit more than usual. There are more people
moving around, more voices in the air, more
copies being made, and more phone calls ringing.
Part of this increase in the action has to do
with our vocational literacy pilot project,
which is swinging into full motion.
The
initiative for this project started last June
when we brought experts together at the Free
Library to talk about an emerging best practice
in teaching English as a Second Language --
Vocational Literacy. The idea is to teach
English language learners workplace-specific
English and skills, rather than generic phrases.
Vocational literacy makes it easier for workers
to obtain jobs and advance in their careers, and
enhances their lifelong earning potential. The
more we learned about the concept of teaching
language skills that directly related to our
clients' jobs, the more we wanted to get
involved.
With support from the
Department of Public Welfare through the
Philadelphia Workforce Development Corporation,
we started a pilot project to serve a small
group of limited English proficient clients. It
has been exciting getting the project off the
ground and working with local companies and
other vocational literacy programs around the
country to develop curriculum and share ideas.
We welcome the new sights and sounds
here in the office. We welcome them because we
believe vocational literacy is a powerful and
rapid way for people with limited English to
enter the workforce. And at the Welcoming
Center, we believe that the best preparation
for being in the American workplace is to be in
the American workplace.
(Photo by Chris Sembrot.)
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Dear Friends and
Colleagues, 
Two Welcoming Center staff
members, Margaret Hilsdon and Yana Chernov,
recently visited the Greater Olney Library. They
talked to the patrons and library staff about
immigrants' needs and questions and distributed
resource materials. 
The Welcoming Center
recently came into contact with the Liberian
United Women in Progress (LUWIP), a nonprofit
organization located in Bryn Mawr, PA. LUWIP was
founded in 2000 by a group of Liberian women who
share a passion for promoting and supporting
young Liberian women in their effort to achieve
their personal and professional goals. They
encourage women to pursue education,
self-empowerment, and improve their standard of
living. 
We have recently discovered
a great resource from the Migration Policy
Institute called the 
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