#GivingEveryTuesday: Refugees
Each Tuesday, SHARE Omaha features a unique cause theme for #GivingEveryTuesday and encourages our community to give and support in any way we can! This week's #GivingEveryTuesday theme is Refugees. Today is the best day give a gift to support local refugees!
Immigrant Legal Center + Refugee Empowerment Center
Rose of ILC + REC shares, "With global displacement at an all-time high due to famine, conflict, political instability, and natural disasters, individuals and their families are forced to flee their homelands in search of safety. Everyone deserves to live in safety and stability, and by giving refugees culturally responsive services and wraparound services, we can ensure refugees thrive in our community."
ILC + REC is making the community a better place by ensuring our newest neighbors have the resources they need to thrive. We provide refugees with job support, cultural orientation, affordable housing, and other wraparound services in a holistic and culturally appropriate way that gives them the tools they need to succeed in their new lives in Omaha and Lincoln.
"As an agency, we need more community volunteers to assist in setting up homes for arriving refugees. Our agency is resettling 800 refugees in Omaha and Lincoln this year. Our newest neighbors come with very few belongings, and our agency ensures their new home has everything they need to get settled. We are looking for community members to help set up homes, so they are ready for a refugee’s arrival," says Rose.
Donate to Immigrant Legal Center + Refugee Empowerment Center
Learning for ALL
John Nania of Learning for ALL shares, "By increasing adult learners' literacy and numeracy skillsets and the number of adults with a high school equivalence/GED. LFA helps support our economy and improves local families' quality of life, job prospects, and economic well-being. By expanding LFA's participant capacity, geographic reach, programs, and services, we seek to address and help remedy adult education issues on a larger scale by providing robust opportunities for adult learners to thrive with greater access to resources and services needed to elevate their lives and support them by empowering them to acquire the language, literacy, and life skills necessary to achieve their life goals. We work to enable more adults to pass the GED test and earn high school credentials, to read and write in the native language of their new homeland, to find and gain meaningful employment or improve their current employment status, to acquire citizenship, to obtain a driver's license, to care for their family, to participate in their children's education and work with their children's educators, to improve their life skills, to acquire the skills needed to open their own business, and to achieve their life goals."
The Nebraska State Department of Education reports that 17% of people in the Omaha area are functionally illiterate, yet only 8% of adults in need of literacy and adult educational services are being reached. This means approximately 170,000 people in Omaha struggle to get through the day because they can't read well enough to order from a menu, fill out a job application, read their medications, or help their children with homework. Coupled with a growing number of immigrants and refugees choosing to call Omaha home and requiring adult educational services, our community's need for adult educational services grows while services and state funding shrink.
In December 2022, Nebraska was ranked 50th in the U.S. in state funding for adult education at $2.00 per eligible adult. Rising costs caused dramatic drops in adults taking and passing the GED nationally. The decrease in Omaha (71%) is more significant than the national average, meaning fewer adults can fill jobs requiring a high school diploma, fewer can pursue higher education, and more are stuck in low-wage work. Nearly 105,000 working-age residents in the Omaha area lack a high school diploma or equivalent, while 52% of employers had positions requiring a diploma or equivalent that went unfilled. In July 2023, the House Appropriations Committee released its draft appropriations bill for fiscal year 2024. The bill contains substantial cuts to many education lines that impact adult education programs. "The more financial support we receive, the more students we can serve. The more volunteers we recruit and retain, the more students we can serve," says John.
Plus, learn about the work of these dedicated nonprofits serving refugees in the greater Omaha/Council Bluffs metro:
Nebraska Afghan Community Center
OneWorld Community Health Centers, Inc.