Museum mentoring program aims to help Tucson refugees integrate

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson lives inside an old firehouse downtown. The host explained the exhibits to Erica Prather and Nazanin Sayed Abed in early March as nearby construction noise ricocheted through the cavernous building.

Prather and Abed were there together on a regular meetup that’s part of a mentorship program for refugees.

Abed was forced to flee Afghanistan. Resettled in southern Arizona, she had purple hair and was nearing the end of her sophomore year in high school.

“When I’m doing art or drawing, it makes me feel better,” she said.

Abed’s passion is why she and Prather went to the museum. Abed set goals to become more involved in the local art community and improve at English. Prather volunteered to be a mentor. They were matched up by Lutheran Social Services of the Southwest (LSS-SW).

“Seeing what she needs to thrive and feel safe, and comfortable and welcome in Tucson, and in the United States, that’s really important to me,” said Prather.

Refugee resettlement groups helped almost 85,000 people start over in the U.S. in just one year not that long ago. These organizations had to change how they worked when federal policy cut arrivals to record lows. A longtime Arizona nonprofit has focused on giving individual help to young people who are settled, but not integrated.

The Refugee Youth Mentoring Program is in its infancy. It’s fueled by roughly $150,000 in federal grant money that’s routed through the state. It aims to fill a gap in resettlement work by giving young refugees individual help with a kind of assimilation that they get to choose.

“We have a pretty strong vetting process. So I do extensive interviews and we really try to build the community,” said Brooke Balla, program development coordinator and mentor specialist at LSS-SW.

Balla and her partner, Michelle Schatz, developed and run the program together. In seven months, they paired 70 refugees with mentors.

“It all comes down to relationship, cross-cultural understanding and reciprocity,” said Balla.

Schedules, transportation and common interests help drive each pairing. The mentee sets an academic, professional or social goal. The mentor commits to spend four months working with them. Balla said that’s often enough time to just start a relationship.

“We’re hoping that you're going to extend it beyond that,” she said.

Extended contact was harder when resettlement networks were built for volume, even though new arrivals were immediately embraced by a co-sponsor, faith group or volunteers.

“We rush in, and we create a home for them, and try to teach them how to live in the United States and then as time goes on, those volunteers kind of drift away,” said Connie Phillips, president and CEO of LSS-SW.

The drastic cut in refugees allowed into the U.S. has meant a chance for resettlement groups to focus more on new and recent arrivals.

“This program is serving a gap that we see. That is those people that are settled, but not really integrated,” said Phillips.

Refugees between ages 15 and 24, who are within five years of resettlement, are eligible for the program. Society-wide, there’s been an emphasis on unattached youth who don’t work or go to school. Having a mentor means having a role model, which gives recent arrivals a key ingredient for success.

“It’s gaining that sense of independence and belonging, both,” said Phillips.

Outside the art museum, mentor Prather said she’s also started teaching Abed how to drive, which she very likely never would have been able to do in Afghanistan.