Former Refugees Forge New Paths Towards Success

Helping former refugees take full advantage of the opportunities available to them as citizens of the United States is the goal of a project just awarded funding from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement. This three-year "Successful New Americans Project" (SNAP) is spearheaded by the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC) of Washington, DC — the national capacity-building and advocacy organization managed by and for Americans of Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, and Vietnamese descent.

SNAP is a collaborative project that will help community-based organizations known as mutual assistance associations (or MAAs) in four different states to empower their clients economically, professionally, socially, and culturally. "SNAP will help new Americans from Southeast Asia to improve their own lives, their families, and their communities. It’s about giving people the tools they need in order to take charge of their own destinies — not about giving hand-outs," reports SEARAC Executive Director KaYing Yang, who fled from Laos as a young girl in 1976. "One of the most important things about SNAP is that it is locally based and will be managed within the target communities. This will ensure that the project will be especially responsive to client needs. SNAP is also innovative because it will foster productive working relationships between national and community-based organizations, and because it will help some of the nation’s most successful new Americans to teach other new immigrants and refugees the secrets of their success," Ms. Yang adds.

Such a program is sorely needed, according to Ms. Yang. Many Southeast Asian Americans — who together number nearly two million — have succeeded by their own estimation and according to mainstream standards, but many others have not. For example, the last Census found that while 10% of all Americans and 14% of all Asian Americans were officially impoverished, 47% of Cambodians, 66% of Hmong, 67% of Laotians, and 34% of Vietnamese were impoverished. Community members and advocates hope that these and similar phenomena will be shown to have improved by the 2000 Census. However, there is broad agreement that such banes as poverty remain prevalent among Southeast Asian Americans, and that the "model minority" image of Asian Americans glosses over many important social facts.

SEARAC will implement SNAP with the Cambodian Association of Greater Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA), the Fresno Center for New Americans (Fresno, CA), the Newcomers Community Service Agency (formerly the Indochinese Community Center of Washington, DC, and Falls Church, VA), and the Research and Development Institute (Houston, TX). Each of these organizations will act as host to a full-time SNAP Field Coordinator. Each Field Coordinator will focus on working with Americans of a different Southeast Asian American ethnic group: Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, and Vietnamese. In addition, in the project’s third year, SEARAC will work with Hmong National Development, Inc. (Washington, DC) and the Southeast Asia Community Resource Center (Rancho Cordova, CA) in order to publish and disseminate research reports.

SNAP will provide institution-strengthening, coalition-building, direct-client, research, and information dissemination services that will strengthen refugee individuals, families, and communities. SNAP will also ensure that what is learned from the project will be used to strengthen success-oriented programs among other refugees and immigrants. It will do this by producing, distributing, and publicizing a multilingual research report on success — and the lack of success — among its target populations. SNAP’s third year will be dedicated to consultation and technical assistance that will bring the research report’s results, best practices, and recommendations into the hands of diverse audiences throughout the nation; and to helping interested organizations make concrete use of research report contents.

For more information, contact:

Narin Sihavong,
SNAP Project Manager,
Tel: (202) 667-4690 Email: searac@searac.org