Ithaca Welcomes Refugees creates local food services guide

By Jamie Swinnerton
Tompkins Weekly

 

Since December of 2015, Ithaca Welcomes Refugees, a volunteer-led organization, has been helping newly arrived refugees and at-risk immigrants in the Ithaca community find support and services locally. As part of this mission, IWR has recently released a comprehensive guide of local food services, and helpful information related to accessing those resources.

Emily Morgan is a Post Doctorate Associate with Cornell University and one of the authors of the guide and a team leader for the IWR resettlement support team. Over the past year, she and a team of other academics have been creating the guide with a community-need focus.

“Through the families, we work with and the partnerships we have, something that we had been consistently hearing and continue to hear is that families and individuals often struggle to find consistent food support. So, this can basically mean anything that families need to achieve food security,” Morgan said. “So, after hearing this several times. Having families tell us ‘I don’t know where I can go to get x,’ or ‘I’m having trouble finding y,’ and also realizing that Ithaca is exceptionally rich in food resources. No one should go hungry here, we have so many amazing organizations and charities and people and resources. We decided to put together a guide that would sort of encompass the most important food resources for immigrants and international newcomers.”

The organization found the money to create the guide through a grant from World Learning, an international non-profit organization that focuses on improving global education.

For Morgan, a strong motivation was to let people know what resources were already available. Ithaca is a resource-rich community when it comes to food security, but for a recent immigrant, those resources may not be as accessible.

“A big motivation for me was that people were telling us that they didn’t realize that all of these resources were available. So, a big motivation at the beginning was how can we summarize information that’s already out there but possibly in a more low English learner type of way, and then once we got into it we realized that oh the people we were working with have varying levels of English,” Morgan said. “There were people connected with the Universities who said I’ve lived here for months or I’ve lived here for years and I didn’t realize until recently that these different stores existed, or I didn’t have the confidence riding TCAT to find them, or just very basic barriers that people face.”

It was through speaking with the community that the guide was created.

“We designed this to be an academic-community collaboration where we wanted to make sure that the resource that we put together was really well targeted to the community’s needs,” she said. “Our big concern was we didn’t want to create a tool that we thought would be helpful for people, we wanted to create a tool that people thought would be helpful for themselves.”

Over the past eight months, the guide team conducted interviews, held focus groups and mapping workshops, and once a rough draft of the guide was put together some of the community members they had been working with gave feedback.

“We sort of presented people with drafts and sat in groups and went through it and talked about what was working and what wasn’t working and because of that we were able to identify a whole bunch of areas that we had not thought about on our own but that ended up being really important,” said Morgan.

One of the most surprising outcomes of these conversations for Morgan was how much the community wanted to volunteer with the available food systems resources, programs, and organizations. For many of these newly arrived refugees and at-risk immigrants, it was through their own networks that they learned about available resources. But once they started getting involved and volunteered, they grew their community, practiced their English, perhaps found a free meal, and learned more about the resources that are available.

“So, we do have a page in this guide that’s dedicated to places where you could just volunteer to help in the local food system,” Morgan said. “When we started to do this project we thought it was going to be largely a directory, and we do have directory sections in there, but I would say some of the most interesting and important pieces were things that we had not thought of at all.”

Another aspect that the community often spoke of was the unique language barriers that can be found when buying food, or going out to eat. Phrases, terms and the American way of ordering food may be completely foreign to a newly arrived immigrant.

“People face a lot of barriers related to going out to eat, so not just that they had or have difficulty reading the menu but also when someone says ‘How do you want your meat cooked?’ and you come from somewhere where there’s just one way that the meat’s always cooked, not having any idea how to respond,” Morgan said.

Tipping can also be a very confusing aspect of the experience while dining out. Many other cultures do not tip. Questions abound for people not used to the practice. How much do you tip? When do you tip? Another unique phrase that has confused some of the people Morgan to spoke was “change.” When someone asks you if you want your change, but you’ve never heard the phrase before, it can feel like your money is being stolen when you answer no. It’s a story Morgan said she heard while collecting information for the guide.

Looking to the future, Morgan said that the next step the organization wants to tackle is translating the guide into different languages. But that too will have to start with some research. What are the languages that IWR community members would find most helpful? Where can translators be found for the more obscure languages? But for now, the guide is being distributed to the IWR community after a year of preparation.

The guide was officially launched and given to the IWR community at an organization lunch on Wednesday, Feb. 21 at the First Presbyterian Church of Ithaca, which is also where the IWR offices and the BOCES adult ESL classes are housed. The BOCES program was a strategic partner in the guide’s creation, Morgan explained, and is an important partner to the overall IWR mission.