Catholic Charities seeks support for refugees

Program information meeting set March 5

Catholic Charities of New Mexico is reaching out to local religious and civic organizations to help provide ongoing support for refugee families settled in Albuquerque.

Through its new program — “Team Refugee” — Catholic Charities is offering to train support teams to work with refugees who have been here several months but still need help with such things as transportation and cultural assimilation, said program director Celia Yapiti.

Catholic Charities will hold a meeting to explain the new program at 2 p.m. on Sunday, March 5, at the Catholic Charities office at 2010 Bridge SW.

Yapiti stressed that the meeting will not be political but will focus on concrete practical ways to help.

For those interested, Catholic Charities will provide four hours of training and ongoing supervision. They would work in teams of five that would be matched with a refugee family for a minimum of six months.

Catholic Charities is one of two agencies locally contracted by the federal government to work with refugees in New Mexico. Yapiti said the organization decided to stop accepting new arrivals to focus on providing long-term support to those already here before President Trump’s controversial late-January order suspending the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program for four months.

Lutheran Family Services Rocky Mountains, the other refugee resettlement agency working in New Mexico, is still ready to accept new refugees once they can be admitted into the United States, said program director Tarrie Burnett.

For more information, call Celia Yapiti, program director, Center for Refugee Support, Catholic Charities, at 505-724-4691.