Canada’s Calgary Public Library runs after-school clubs in several locations to assist children from immigrant families with their homework. In the Netherlands, the Witte Tulp Foundation provides intensive training to prepare immigrant youths for the nation’s high-stakes exam. The YMCA-YWCA of Canada runs a recreational program for immigrant youths designed to integrate them in to Canadian society and help them to cope with their new surroundings.
These are some of the projects supporting after-school activities mentioned in a report, “Pathways to Immigrant Opportunity,” released this month by New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. The report is written by Carola Suarez-Orozco and Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, co-directors of Immigration Studies at New York University. They are authors of the book, Learning a New Land, and have been studying the integration of immigrants into new societies, with a focus on education, for a very long time.
The on-line report provides links to many projects that help to integrate immigrant children and their parents into their new homelands. Readers of this blog will be familiar with many of the U.S.-based projects, such as the network of international high schools for ELLs in New York City.
But for some fresh information, explore the descriptions and links of some of the projects featured from around the world.
By the way, if you are involved in a noteworthy effort to help integrate immigrants into U.S. society, and you were overlooked by the Suarez-Orozco team, the Migration Policy Institute is taking applications through Dec. 10 for its national awards program that recognizes such efforts.