Chris George, executive director of IRIS: Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services, will be visiting St. Mark’s Episcopal Church on Sunday, January 22nd with a special purpose. “New Canaan Welcomes,” a local group spun off of the New Canaan Moms Facebook page, has been approved by IRIS to welcome a refugee family to the area in the coming weeks.
Led by local mom Juli Kurtzman, New Canaan Welcomes began as a question. “I asked myself what I could do that would make the most impact, something I could personally take on to give back, and I thought: Sponsor a refugee family.”
Refugees are persons who are forced to flee their home countries because of a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. Refugees usually escape to neighboring countries, where they wait to return home, or apply for resettlement in another country like the United States. IRIS works with the U.S. State Department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, which ensures that applicants go through a vetting process that typically takes 2 years. Many have been waiting for much longer, however. Of the approximately 14 million refugees worldwide, about 50,000 are invited to start new lives in the United States. Of these, approximately 500 resettle in Connecticut annually.
Amid the reports and horrific images from Aleppo, Kurtzman posted on the 1600+ strong New Canaan Moms group, asking whether anyone else was interested in joining her. The response was immediate and enthusiastic. Almost one hundred moms pledged to help, some because they shared Kurtzman’s wish to give back, others because they had lived through experiences of political upheaval and relocation, many because they count immigrants and refugees amongst their friends.
Kurtzman and a small group of organizers then spun into action. Muslim, Jewish, and Christian moms, older and younger moms, conservative and liberal moms came together to do research on refugee resettlement and get trained by IRIS in New Haven. They began working on their application to IRIS, which requires that the group operate as a 501c3 nonprofit. That’s when St. Mark’s stepped in.
At its inception in 1982, IRIS had been affiliated with the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut. It has since gone out on its own but continues to be supported by various secular and faith-based groups. Some of the moms from New Canaan Welcomes are parishioners at St. Mark’s. Clergy and the vestry there were contacted about formally joining as partners on the initiative.
New Canaan Welcomes volunteers have also met with others doing this work locally, like New Canaan’s First Presbyterian Church and the Fish Church in Stamford, who welcomed a Syrian family about 5 months ago. Piggybacking off of their efforts will be enormously helpful, says Kurtzman, and is actually a hallmark of how it’s done here in Connecticut. After being vetted by the Office of Homeland Security, refugee families arriving here are helped by community volunteers rather than by government agencies, as is the case in other states. New Canaan Welcomes will be finding a new home for the family in either Norwalk or Stamford, where rents are more affordable and there is access to public transportation; taking them to their initial health visits; teaching them how to use local buses and trains; enrolling them in school and ESL classes; explaining money management and food shopping; helping secure employment—basically giving them a strong start toward self-sufficiency.
Interest in New Canaan Welcomes continues to grow. All are invited to hear Chris George preach at the 8:00 and 10:00am services at St. Mark’s Church on Sunday, January 22nd. George will also speak at the 9:00 am Adult Forum in the church’s Morrill Hall; coffee will be served.
Image: Chris George, Executive Director http://www.irisct.org
Any questions please contact: Micaela Porta, 203.594.7288, enginebooks@yahoo.com