Immigrant Leadership Institute
Enrollment for the Immigrant Leadership Institute is OPEN!
About the Immigrant Leadership Institute:
The Immigrant Leadership Institute (ILI) equips foreign-born residents of the Greater Philadelphia region with the skills, knowledge, and tools necessary to engage in the civic life of their community. By employing a dynamic approach, ILI creates opportunities for immigrants to speak for themselves and participate in the cultural, political, and social life of the city. This model enhances the meaningful participation of immigrant communities in the city’s decision-making processes and helps immigrants develop leadership skills, enabling them to build a sense of belonging and have true agency over their future.
By taking an asset-based approach, ILI focuses on recognizing people’s skills and talents to support their capacity to overcome barriers to integration while providing opportunities to build relationships, improve language skills, and develop a sense of belonging. The program offers two levels of training:
Level I focuses on intercultural leadership and advocacy skills to build community wellness and foster a sense of belonging.
Level II focuses on strengthening civic identity and building leadership and organizing skills to improve services, programs, and policies that directly impact immigrant communities.
What does ILI do?
- Support participants in forming stronger, meaningful connections between newcomers and existing communities.
- Promote immigrant inclusion and elevate the positive impact of immigrants in all areas of society.
- Build awareness of constitutional rights to foster civic participation.
- Expanded representation of immigrants in public life.
- Reframe deficit thinking about immigration for positive, asset-based language about immigrants.
What you will learn:
- How civic participation can enhance immigrant economic integration
- How to build your confidence through direct experience in a safe and supportive environment.
- How to assert the meaning of citizenship and participate in the civic culture of the city
- How to build new knowledge and skills to create innovative solutions through collective leadership
- How building meaningful connections increases access to resources and opportunities
Program Requirements:
- Be a foreign-born person, refugee, or asylee
- Respect cultural diversity and inclusive practices
- Participate in the required training sessions and team assignments
- Intermediate English level and up
- Support participatory program evaluation
- Promote support for immigrant communities
- At least 21 years of age
What is an Action Project?
- Collaborating with the Free Library of Philadelphia and the Northeast Regional Library to offer a series of training for immigrants living in Northeast Philadelphia on how to access LinkedIn Learning, a free service offered by the library.
- Improving inclusion of immigrant parents at local schools through welcoming policies such as language access.
- Presenting a 5-point proposal to the Philadelphia Office of Adult Education to create an autonomous advisory council made up of adult learners from the system.
- Approaching Philadelphia Works, Inc. to provide quality support services to immigrants seeking employment at Career Links.
- Engaging with Bucks County Commissioners to expand language access and establish welcoming policies that can enhance inclusive economic development.
View some action projects below!
"Who Will Listen To Us?"
On Monday, June 10th a group of 50 people attending a public event organized by a team of four Immigrant Leadership Institute at the Municipal Services Building. The event’s goal was to present a 5-point proposal to the Philadelphia Office of Adult Education to work together to create an advisory council made up of adult learning from the system. The council’s role will be to provide feedback on the quality of adult education services and to help create new services and policies that can meet local communities’ needs. The event was attended by then Executive Director, immigrant adult learners and teachers.
The process started with a listening campaign.
The event’s organizing team organized a listening campaign where each team member interviewed immigrants from their local communities to better understand how they have experience English proficiency as a barrier and what issues lie behind. Besides building relationships with other immigrants, by listening to other people’s stories, the team was able to identify a few issues, such as the limited availability of English classes in Philadelphia, inconvenient class schedules, the lack of contextualized English classes for foreign trained professionals, and the lack of a formal mechanism for the Office of Adult Education to listen to learner voices and incorporate those voices into its policy decision making.
Listening to Public Officials
After their listening campaign, the team requested meetings with representatives from the Office of Adult Education seeking an opportunity to better understand the Office’s role, their organization, the challenges they face, and what collaboration opportunities could be built where adult English learners can be directly involved. The team found the Office staff quite responsive and willing to listen and collaborate.
After the meetings, members of the organizing team continued learning about the situation of adult learners in Philadelphia and then proceeded to elaborate a basic proposal on how the issues could be addressed. Thus, their proposal includes the following:
- Create an Advisory Council made up of English learners inside the Office. We need the Office to recognize that this is something important.
- The Advisory Council must be autonomous in making its own decisions but work closely together with the staff.
- The role of the Advisory Council will be to bring together adult learners to offer feedback, ideas and recommendations to the Office.
- Members of the Advisory Council must receive compensation for their time.
- We would also like to ask that we work together to seek additional funding to support the development of this Council.
The Public Event
With the support of the Office of Immigrant Affairs (OIA), the team was able to secure a venue for a public event that brought immigrants and nonimmigrants together, including the Executive Director of the Office of Adult Education, and a representative from AOI, to discuss the issues and proposal.
As a result, a mutual commitment was made to follow up over the next several months to further details.
"We Speak the Same Language" - 12th Cohort
“Welcome, we speak the same language” is an action project that was organized by a team of Graduates in the 12 Cohort of the Immigrant Leadership Institute. The team members included Marilu Salazar Mendez from Venezuela, Liliya Usmanova from Uzbekistan, Ida Kuraeny Bestio from Indonesia, and Lamia Mebtouche from Algeria with the sweet support of Liliya’s 6-year-old son, Marsel Mukhamedov.
The Team chose to investigate the barrier of how immigrants access information while going through the integration process in the US. They decided to develop their Action project to support immigrants in accessing information to help overcome the barrier “Lack of information and resources while in the integration process in the US.” Through the team’s listening campaigns, they observed the unique way that immigrants obtain information through family and friends even though there are several organizations in Philadelphia who give information freely. The team organized a public event where they created a safe space where people could come together to connect, share their stories and experiences and information that they needed.
The action project event was held on Wednesday May 10 at The Welcoming Center with 37 participants in attendance. Through the efforts of Marilu Salzar Mendez, who is also a community leader, the team was able to connect with Gente de Venezuela https://gentedevenezuela.org/ a non-profit organization that supports Venezuelans and Hispanic Immigrants by promoting cultural and professional development in the Greater Philadelphia Area. The team was also supported by Erick Barragan Ramirez, a graduate from the 2nd Cohort of the Immigrant Leadership Institute, member of the Participant Advisory Council, who currently works at Catholic Social services as an Accredited legal representative https://cssphiladelphia.org/immigration-legal-services/
The event engaged the audience through stories that reflected shared experiences in accessing information as an immigrant as well and conversational questions that created a space for people to share more about the resources that they had found useful. There was also a beautiful moment of entertainment with songs that was led by one of the team members Liliya and her 6-year-old son Marcel through song and dance.
Reflections from Team Members:
Marilu Salazar Mendez from Venezuela
“I felt that the event was nice, and we were able to do what we planned and wanted to do. The event also revealed that there is still a need for information among immigrants. “I saw this event as a big responsibility and did a lot in the team for the event. The challenge was not in doing the event in as much as it was more about the language and having to communicate ideas and thoughts in Englis”. It was a great time to have opportunities to talk in English.
“This event is an important point of reference in the future because as a community volunteer, being a leader through the ILI program became something that built my skills, and I can add to my resume. “The Immigrant leadership Institute is the only important thing that I have been able to do in the US since January of 2023.”
Ida Kuraeny Bestio from Indonesia
“I have been in Philadelphia for the past one year and worked as a Director of sales in my country. I was happy about the event but still felt nervous and not satisfied with my English vocabulary though I felt confident during the event as one of the Masters of Ceremony.
I was used to organizing events in my country for close to 4000 people and I would invite speakers from other countries for such big events, I was used to speaking Infront of many people in my native language and English.
“I appreciate the way that ILI created a space where the learning process was more open to discussions where everyone was able to talk.
"Let's Talk Philly" Conversation Circles
Ideation: These English Conversation Circles are small groups of 6-8 participants who meet twice a week for two hours each session to practice their spoken English with the help of two facilitators. The groups are organized as a peer-to-peer system where participants control their learning and decide what topics they want to talk about, and how to learn.
The organizing team conceived of the project through a listening campaign that asked recently arrived immigrants about their experience building English proficiency. In response, the team decided to concentrate on helping immigrants practice English in a safe environment. Their goal was to “motivate immigrants to practice English speaking skills through informal meetings with comfortable and fun methods”, and also help them build up their confidence to gain independence and better their lives in the city. The informal nature of the conversation circles meant that it was conducted without the presence of teachers and students but a peer-to-peer environment that gives every participant control of their own learning.
Their project design places emphasis on ensuring that participants understand that a conversation circle is not a class, and that nobody in the circles is a teacher. There is also interest in ensuring that participants evaluate their own progress through short surveys and group reflection.
Another critical design element is that all participants have an opportunity to practice facilitation skills. This is particularly important because it helps to recognize and inject into the learning environment the skills, experiences, and passion of the participants. Most importantly, it is a way to establish a sense of mutual responsibility in the collective learning process.
Next Steps: After graduating from the Immigrant Leadership Institute, Karen and Yu-Shan joined The Welcoming Center’s Intercultural Wellness Program (IWP), which trains immigrants on the concepts of community wellness and well-being among immigrant communities. ‘Let’s Talk Philly! Conversation Circles’ continues organizing conversation circles for immigrant communities to this day.