Who We Are
We are a community-wide connection of program and service providers in the Akron area focused on the shared goal of seeing every immigrant and refugee thrive in life and helping our communities thrive from the contributions of immigrants.
What We Believe
We believe that immigrants and refugees thrive when they have been given a wide array of supports and opportunities to bring the richness of who they are and what they’ve experienced as they seek to integrate into American society. In turn, the community benefits from the richness of their meaningful contributions in all the ways they give back.
What We Do
We work together to achieve this unified goal by sharing information, ideas, education, resources and collaborative problem-solving to benefit those we serve in real-time and in highly practical ways. Through our continued collaboration, we can make an even greater impact in the immigrant and refugee community.
Collaborate
We collaborate among our member organizations and work to understand each other’s independent missions and services to ensure they are leveraged appropriately. This makes each of our programs stronger by working together instead of trying to do all of our own things independently.
Collaboration makes our individual organizations stronger and our group efforts more impactful.
Together, we:
- Work together intentionally and synergistically.
- Drive collaboration within this group and pool our resources to address systemic needs and issues.
- Ensure we’re collaborating in a timely and effective manner with non-member partner groups.
- Connect with other cultural groups or organizations led by immigrants to support their work through capacity building and advocacy. Also, let’s have some fun together!
Advocate
We work together to speak on behalf of the needs and rights of immigrants, and give space and voice to collaborative immigrant service providers.
Together, we:
- Create special initiatives that address identified needs to elevate our influence.
- Provide micro client-based advocacy that can impact more macro-level advocacy.
Communicate
We support the vision of sharing information, ideas, education and resources through clear and consistent communication internally and externally.
Internal Communication:
- Create and leverage tools for sharing information internally between member groups to support and improve communication within IN-Akron, and to keep this information current and relevant.
- We prioritize information and opportunity sharing between organizations.
External Communication:
- Create and leverage tools to more effectively share information with the immigrant community we serve.
- Nurture communication pathways and relationships with government, police, other related constituencies and the citizens of Akron, to support the Akron immigrant community.