Stories of Community Support

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When Sadie Fowler started working with immigrant women in Portland, Maine, she saw that beyond the economic, linguistic, cultural and sociological obstacles they encountered, almost all of them – from Ecuador or Sudan, Cambodia or Morocco – held close to indigenous crafts brought from their mother countries. Any spare time they had was taken up in making blankets, pots, jewelry or any number of other beautiful, useful objects.

As she began to conceive of a voluntary support group for these new-to-the-U.S. women, many of whom suffered from trauma and other psychological disturbances imported from the troubled lands they had fled, Sadie hit on the idea of combining mental health support with maintaining the heritage of the women’s craft experience. All of these women struggle to balance obligations of family support, livelihood, and adjusting to a foreign culture: Finding time to attend regular meetings with people they didn’t know (and often shared no common language with), in order to discuss intimate personal issues, can often be an insurmountable burden. So Sadie formed the group around the activity of doing and sharing indigenous crafts, which all the participants were doing anyway. (And if Sadie, ever so gently but ever so diligently, steered their conversations around to inquiries into the participants’ state of mind, so be it!)

In order to get the project off the ground, Sadie needed to pay for interpreters and some child care. Bread for the Journey of Portland was happy to grant her $650 toward that goal. Since then, the group of 6-12 women meets twice a month. Sadie reports great progress in their English and their contentment despite the huge upheavals in their lives – and, some exquisite hand-crafted objects from all over the world.

Seeing as One

Portland, Maine became a host city for Sudanese refugees even before the terrors of Darfur began. At first, these few new inhabitants of a wintry city in Maine all knew each other and banded together for support. Although that supportive infrastructure remains, by 2009 the Sudanese presence in Portland had grown to 2,500 – indeed, the city is home to more Sudanese immigrants than anywhere else in the U.S. -- and close ties were harder to maintain. Moreover, there have been several violent incidents including deaths at the hands of Portland police and others.

Enter Alfred Jacob, himself a Sudanese immigrant and director of the Portland United Soccer League. Alfred saw first-hand that a growing population of immigrants was finding it harder and harder to keep in touch, and that issues all immigrant communities face – assimilation, racism, drugs, job opportunities, and so on – threatened to divide the community. So Alfred decided to start up a newspaper for Portland’s Sudanese, called One Vision. In his own words, “One Vision is a product of its founders’ hopes for a community that is more empowered, more involved, and more aware of opportunities and resources than it is today. We hope, as editors, reporters, writers, and photographers, to create a paper that can help our community to move forward from its troubled present into a prosperous future. Through the articles we write, the advertisements that we run, and the opportunities we provide, we hope that One Vision can play a meaningful role in the process of changing the Portland community for the better.”

Bread for the Journey of Portland made a grant to Alfred for $500, which went toward crucial start-up supplies such as notebooks and other stationery, recording equipment, and an internet connection. One Vision has become essential reading for Portland’s (still growing) Sudanese community, and provides anyone at all with an intimate ground-level view of what it means to be American today.

Many and One

Founded by Pious Ali, the Maine Interfaith Youth Alliance is dedicated to bringing together youths of myriad religious, national, ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds who are interested in bridging gaps and coming to understand and appreciate each other more deeply. MIYA intends to hold regular gatherings, run educational programs and present communal art that speaks to our collective need to know and love each other in spite of our differences. Additionally, they will introduce an Interfaith Youth Service program where youth of various traditions will come together for annual service projects that benefit the Greater Portland community. Bread for the Journey of Portland granted $1800 to Maine Interfaith Youth Alliance to purchase a laptop computer and other startup supplies.

It Takes a Garden

Since its fall 2007 opening, East End Community School in Portland, Maine, has consistently sought to be a comprehensive resource for its vibrant neighborhood and beyond. Last spring, the PTO (Parent/Teacher Organization) embarked on an ambitious project to create a community garden on the school grounds, to be used by students during the school day as well as by parents and other community members at other times. With grants from the City of Portland and others, they built garden beds, lined up seed sources and put the infrastructure in place. With a $1000 grant from Bread for the Journey of Portland, they were able to purchase tools and other supplies.

Different Words, Same Language

With 21 different native languages spoken by its student body, Hall Elementary School has long been at the vanguard of efforts to increase awareness and inclusion of the many diverse communities within Portland, Maine. To kick off the school's 50 th anniversary last spring, a group of parents, led by Lisa Thomas-Prince and Deb Rothenberg, hosted a multicultural literacy fair at the Hall library. The centerpiece of this fair was the display of a new collection of bilingual books, representing nine languages -- from Arabic to Khmer to Serbo-Croatian to Swahili and others -- that are most commonly spoken within their district. Native speakers read aloud from the new books and a packed house of Hall students and parents got a direct experience of the true wealth in their own community. Bread for the Journey of Portland contributed $350 to purchase the initial collection of bilingual books.

LEAPing Over Obstacles

LEAP Family Literacy provides careful integration of educational opportunities to fifteen low-income refugee and immigrant families in Portland, OR. Transportation and childcare issues often prevent these families from obtaining the schooling that they need, so LEAP strives to assist them in surmounting these barriers. This fall, LEAP was gearing up to teach English classes to parents while their pre-school-age kids participated in a Head Start program, but ran into a challenge serving the children under age three. They had a childcare provider and convenient space lined up but did not anticipate the nine extra babies and toddlers they gained this fall. All members of the team stepped in to help, but it was not sustainable. Although they recruited volunteers, those volunteers could not legally take the place of licensed professionals.

Frustration mounted when a parent within the community was poised for the job but there was no funding to hire her. Bread for the Journey of Portland contributed $3,000 to enable LEAP to hire an additional childcare provider for the year. Two professionals, a Sudanese and an American, will now have access to hiring opportunities with PROP (Portland Regional Opportunity Program) — the partner organization that hosts the childcare facility — and educational support from the adult educator and early childhood specialist on the team. With school and quality care in place for their children, the parents in the program can prepare to become citizens, to get better jobs, and to educate their families. If parents are to be their children's first and best teachers, such support is vital.

Honoring Mothers

The perfect mother always adores her baby, loves to nurse, coo and giggle, and play with her baby all day long. Yet she still manages to make dinner, keep the house clean, always smiles, and doesn’t need sleep because everything is just so wonderful! Like most images of perfection, that one is also mostly false. In truth, many new mothers are crushed to find themselves alone with an infant who makes lots of demands and provides little immediate gratification. All too often, these women suffer alone under the weight of others’ expectations of the role of the perfect mother.

Enter Martha Tole and Linda Boardman, both doulas (women who give assistance during labor and after childbirth ) with years of experience caring for new mothers. They have begun the Postpartum Support Center of Maine. Their plans run from the creation of a statewide “warm-line” for peer support of families coping with perinatal mood and anxiety disorders, to getting brochures that outline the signs of postpartum depression into the hands of every new mother in the state, to creating a statewide database listing support services for a host of postpartum conditions. Bread for the Journey of Portland gave them a grant of $1,750 to pay for administrative startup and publicity materials, including web design and brochures.

Performing Bias

Creating a positive school climate for students from diverse backgrounds is a priority for educators around the country. Schools in Portland, Maine – home to the most ethnically, racially and religiously diverse student body in the state – have worked for a long time to build a respectful community that condemns harassment based on sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, socio-economic class and religion. Yet a recent study by a national organization that works to prevent hate violence identified such harassment as particular areas of concern in the city’s schools. To their credit, school administrators, faculty and students confronted the study head-on and began to work openly and honestly to improve this condition.

Toward that end, ROiL — a local company of artists dedicated to theater for social change — collaborated with Portland High School’s Civil Rights Team to produce an original play about bias in their schools. They followed up their six-week workshop and the ensuing performances with student-led discussions among different audiences in the community. The students learned how to use performance as a powerful and effective means of initiating and intensifying dialogue among their peers. Bread for the Journey of Portland made a grant to ROiL of $1,650 for artist stipends, materials, and associated costs.

For Bread – and Soup – a Journey

Each year, the students at Casco Bay High School of Portland, Maine, are given a break from their regular high school curriculum to focus on an issue of collective and personal significance. One class took to heart that they “are what they eat.” During their post-Thanksgiving-break “intensive,” they designed a weeklong curriculum exploring the food they eat and how it affects the wider community.

They spent a day with a member of the local chapter of Slow Food USA, learning about everything from agricultural history to food marketing, economics and culture. They took another day in the field, talking with farmers and helping harvest root vegetables. The rest of the week was spent with local community agriculture groups, and then the real action began. The students baked bread at a local bakery, and then took a batch of it to a local soup kitchen where they helped serve lunch. They sold the rest of the bread in a public square, with the proceeds going to a local charitable organization. The intensive concluded with an action plan developed by each student identifying food-related problems – and solutions – from his or her own community, focusing on the benefits of eating and shopping locally. Bread for the Journey of Portland gave a grant of $500 to the class for transportation and to pay for the bread’s ingredients.

When most people think of education, they think of kindergarten through 12 th grades. But there is life – and learning – after high school. The adult education program of Portland, Maine, serves 1,700 students, many of them recent immigrants striving to create new lives for themselves, in a new land and with a new language. The program is perennially under-funded, as their thirty old-and-sporadically-functional computers will attest.

Enter the COWS – Computers On Wheels. This is a mobile computer lab, with twenty modern wireless laptops, accessible by any student in any classroom. The lab has the added benefit of freeing up what was the computer room. In a program with 35 students per class and active waiting lists for half the English for Speakers of Other Languages classes, extra space is vitally important. The computers offer English language support through Rosetta Stone software, as well as web-based software and personal storage space. The entire lab and support services cost a little more than $20,000. Bread for the Journey of Portland contributed $3,000, and soon after received word that the Adult Education program had received enough other funds to get the lab up and running in time for the second semester.

The Telling Room

Each of us has a unique story to tell. Some people tell their stories to everyone they know; others aren’t even aware they have something worth telling. The Telling Room exists in Portland, Maine, to help local young people tell their stories through writing, singing, or speech. It began in 2005 as a nonprofit center run by accomplished local writers whose work has appeared in myriad national publications. These writers have organized a number of different workshops for Portland storytellers from ages 8 to 18. From the harrowing tales of young war refugees to rap lyrics to class clown rants, in high school classrooms and in performances and workshops, The Telling Room has celebrated the written and spoken word in all its manifestations.

The Telling Room directors – Michael Paterniti, Sara Corbett and Susan Conley – came to Bread for the Journey of Portland in December with an idea for a new endeavor called the Story House Project. This project will involve a group of five to ten high school students who have arrived in the U.S. in recent years from countries as varied as Somalia, Cambodia, Sudan and Croatia. In the course of a six-session “Coming to America” workshop, the directors will discuss different approaches to personal storytelling. After those sessions will come individual month-long mentorships with other local professional writers, and then construction of “story houses,” which are structures in which one can enter, stand and look around. Decorated with pictures and artifacts from the stories themselves, the story houses may include video or audio of the storyteller telling his or her story. The story houses will live at local high schools during their construction and the development of the story performance. When they’re complete, a local performance and art gallery will hold a show of the houses.

Bread for the Journey of Portland made a $1,000 grant to The Telling Room to go towards story house construction and decoration as well as supplies.

Children’s Healthy Environment Campaign

Lead paint is one of the most widespread environmental threats we face. This is especially true in regions such as New England, where so many houses were built and painted before a nationwide ban on the paint went into effect in 1975. Ingesting lead paint dust can bring on a host of ill effects, ranging from nausea to permanent brain damage, with small children at the highest level of risk.

For homeowners with sufficient funds, there are a number of abatement options. But for most renters, those options just don’t exist. Although landlords are required by law to institute lead-safe practices, it usually takes an informed and persistent tenant to prod the landlord into action. That’s where the Portland Tenants Union (PTU) has decided to step in by launching their Children’s Healthy Environment Campaign. PTU representatives go door-to-door in the city’s densest urban districts to inform tenants of the dangers of lead paint, of their rights under the law, and of the most effective ways to get their apartments tested and, if necessary, brought up to acceptable lead-safe standards. They also work directly with landlords to ensure that the process does not lead to antagonism, and is instead developed within a communal spirit of cultivating a healthy environment for all.

In developing the campaign, PTU had relied chiefly on volunteer canvassers. Bread for the Journey of Portland, Maine granted $750 to the Children’s Healthy Environment Campaign, to go towards stipends for those volunteers.

Worth Thousands of Words

(Portland Adult Education student Sarah Khin took these photos of her two sons Charlie and Dara, sitting beneath a picture of home country Cambodia and hugging at the Maine Mall)

Everyone has a story to tell, even when it's hard to share. For many students in Portland, Maine's, Adult Education literacy program, the difficulties are two-fold: They've endured extreme hardships in their native countries before their recent immigration to the U.S.; and their literacy skills are minimal, even in their native tongues. Gail Dawson-Gray, a teacher in the literacy program, found a novel way around these obstacles by working with the students in using photography as a medium for telling their own stories.

The 42 students, divided among three classes with three different teachers, are from all around the world, primarily from Somalia, Afghanistan and Sudan, but also from Southeast Asia and Latin America. Most are middle-aged women, some are young adults, and the Family Literacy class has children in it as well. The Connecting Worlds Literacy/Photography project taught them to take photographs as a way of documenting their own lives in a new country. With the help of their teachers, they took several weeks to discuss and write accounts of their favorite photographs. With the aid of Kodak disposable cameras, they learned invaluable lessons in reading, writing, speaking, creative expression and increased cultural awareness.

In June, Portland Adult Education mounted an exhibit of the students' work at the school, as well as in satellite exhibits at community centers and the Portland Housing Authority administrative offices' boardroom. Bread for the Journey of Portland granted Connecting Worlds $250 to help purchase the disposable cameras and other materials.

Hoops and Hope

(Nothing But Hoops leaders Hamdi Ali, Zachary Yusuf, Safia Hussein and Faduma Tahlil)

It starts with a bouncing orange ball, but it doesn't stop there. Nothing But Hoops (NBH), a three-year-old organization that "brings students together through basketball," serves close to 50 high school youths of different racial backgrounds and neighborhoods in Portland, Maine. Before, during or after a game, the students discuss and tackle close-to-home issues, such as domestic violence, HIV/AIDS, police brutality and drugs. They also benefit from curricula addressing social justice and life skills, as well as college prep courses.

In the spring of 2005, Nothing But Hoops director Sandy Wright started an SAT preparation course for more than a dozen high school juniors. He enlisted the help of a local university professor, Prashant Mittal, who hopes to have as high a degree of success with these students in preparing for the SATs as he did with students in his native India. In the future, Mittal and Wright anticipate that students whose families can afford to pay for the course will help make it self-sustaining. Until then, the new NBH program needs funding. Bread for the Journey of Portland granted them $500 for the necessary books, study guides and software.

Their Story, in Moving Pictures

Many of us have had the thought at some point during our adolescence, "There should be a movie about my life!" Well, some high school students in Portland, Maine's Riverton Park neighborhood didn't just think it … they're doing it! A group of students from an after-school program at the park have started shooting "A Day in the Life of Riverton Park," a non-fiction film documenting the opportunities and challenges of growing up in a racially, economically and culturally diverse community. They plan to show the finished film at various venues around the city, from schools to community centers to performance spaces. The viewings will be followed with discussions of the issues raised, including among others, racism, drugs, and growing up with split cultural allegiances as first-generation immigrants.

The youths - from the People's Regional Opportunity Program Peer Leader program - got an initial grant from another local (and youth-run) social justice foundation. They started shooting digital video footage, and even found some guidance at a community television station. But the group needed an up-to-date computer with video-editing capability, as well as an experienced adult who could teach some of the subtler points of film production. Bread for the Journey of Portland granted $1650 to the Peer Leader program for an Apple iBook computer with a DVD burner and necessary software. They also hooked the group up with a friend of theirs with the experience, technical skills and personality to act as a "creative advisor" to the Riverton Park film team.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of this grant relationship is that it won't end with the finished film this June. The computer will find steady use in other student-directed creative projects at Peer Leader.

The Portland Board (Leah, Melissa, Joe, and Anja)

Contact us at:

Joe Appel
bfjportland@gwi.net
33 Orkney Street
Portland, ME 04103
207-871-0952

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