Project Summary

ICP has been awarded a five-year demonstration grant to model a community-building project for refugee communities in Harrisburg and Erie, Pennsylvania. Included in the project are recently arrived Bosnian, African, Russian, Iraqi, Kurdish and Cuban refugees. This project encourages refugee communities to participate in collaborative efforts and create a shared, multi-ethnic vision for immigrant communities whose numbers are too small in any given location to sustain independent community organization. ICP's partners for this project include Tressler Lutheran Services and the Hispanic American Council of Erie.

The goals of the project are:

• Help emerging refugee communities identify their own assets and resources in order to strengthen their communities
  
• Assist refugee communities organize themselves into effective self-help groups
  
• Encourage refugee communities to participate in collaborative efforts through a shared vision of the capacities and assets of the broader refugee and immigrant communities
  
• Increase refugees’ access to resources and services by building and maintaining bridges to other communities and mainstream local resources and organizations

Based on published reports, refugees resettled in the United States over the past five years have been ethnically more diverse and geographically more dispersed. This trend is reflected in the growing number of new and emerging refugee populations arriving in communities across Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania, these newer groups of refugees include persons from the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia), Iraq and Kurdistan, Cuba, Africa (Somalia, Uganda, Ethiopia, Rwanda) and those from the former Soviet Union (Pentecostal Christians, Ukranians, in addition to the continuing arrivals of Russian Jews).

Tressler-Lutheran Services and the Hispanic American Council of Erie joined with ICP in proposing a three-site, community-building project: two in Central PA (Harrisburg and Lancaster) and one in Erie. this project uses a number of effective community development programs to build a broad base of support within each of these refugee communities and initiate a series of programs and activities to then build bridges to mainstream community resources.

Currently sponsored communities in Central PA

ICP currently is supporting two emerging refugee community projects in Central Pennsylvania. These include the African Immigrant Community Project and the Bosnian Immigrant Community Project. Both of these community projects are emerging as a unifying force for refugees from these communities.

The African community has chosen the name of Umoja African Cultural Community (UACC). Umoja is a Swahili word (one of Africa’s richest and most widely spoken languages) that literally translated means oneness or unity. The root word is MOJA which means ONE. Umoja is pronounced as: Wu-mo-jar. The prefix U modifies the root word making it a noun, just as -ness does in English.

The mission of the UACC is to create opportunities for all people, especially African children and youth, to come together to experience, appreciate, preserve and enrich their culture and its diversity and that of others, thereby, strengthening family ties through an ongoing process of education, participation in cultural activities, exposure to other cultures, with the purpose of bridging cultural gaps, facilitating harmonious coexistence in a diverse community and to strengthen commitment to assist the needy, especially African refugees and immigrants to enable them to achieve smooth transition into the host cultures.