The International Institute of Akron (IIA) helps people born outside the U.S. realize their vision of the American dream by integrating them into society and giving them the tools to become productive and engaged members of the community.
“We teach English, we teach financial literacy and we familiarize immigrants with American culture,” says Elaine Woloshyn, executive director for the nonprofit organization. “We help them navigate the immigration legal system, so we have lawyers on staff who help them with immigration-related issues.
“We provide interpreting and translation services for them. So as they are going about the process of learning or perfecting their English, we are able to help them communicate with folks that they are getting services from the community.”
IIA was founded in 1916. In 2014, the organization assisted 771 individuals with employment services and provided resettlement services to 585 refugees. In addition, 5,360 interpreting services were provided.
“We have a partnership with the State Department and the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants to help them start new lives in Akron,” Woloshyn says. “Immigrant is the term commonly used to describe folks who voluntarily make a decision to move permanently to the U.S. Refugees are invited here by the American government because they have been forced out of their homes and their countries.”
Making a difference
Woloshyn estimates there could be as many as 20 million refugees in the world today, but adds that the U.S. invites only about 70,000 of them each year to resettle in the U.S.
“So it’s a really, really small number of the total proportion of refugees,” she says.
IIA can’t help everyone, obviously, but it is one of the largest refugee resettlement programs in Ohio and it is making a difference. Woloshyn says her team has a partnership with Project Learn to ensure that its English instruction is as high-quality as it can be.
“We’ve got over 20 classes a week that are going on,” she says. “We often have staff that speaks their language, but it’s really effective to do a lot of the teaching in English. The focus is always on teaching English and getting them to begin the process of communicating in English as quickly as possible.”
In addition to language services, IIA helps refugees find a house, furnish it, find a job and enroll their children in school, if that’s something they need.
“And for immigrants, even though we don’t provide a formal type of orientation process; we find that immigrants often come to the institute with questions about a lot of those things too,” Woloshyn says. “We’re able to help them meet other internationals, meet Americans. We know that cultural integration — integration into American society, into this community — is often a success indicator for immigrants and refugees who come to the U.S.”
The sooner those successes can be achieved, the sooner these people can become productive and self-sufficient Americans.
Building partnerships
IIA has about 35 full- and part-time employees, but relies heavily on “many, many volunteers who fill a variety of functions.”
“They do everything from teaching English to providing assistance with orientation to the transportation system,” Woloshyn says. “We give tours of the neighborhoods, since many folks come and, especially refugees, find their first homes in the U.S. on North Hill. So we depend a lot on volunteers to assist us with all of those kinds of services.”
But it’s not just the people being helped who have diverse histories. Many IIA employees have lived abroad for extended periods of time and are bilingual, if not trilingual.
“We are familiar with the cultures, the countries that they’re coming from,” she says. “I think that the institute — we’re very customer-centered and we want immigrants and refugees to feel comfortable when they come here, to feel welcome and to feel that we understand their needs and are going to be able to help them.”
Assistance and expertise is also provided by other nonprofits and organizations that can contribute to the cause in their own unique ways.
“So we don’t try to become experts at everything,” Woloshyn says. “We don’t ever think that we can meet all of the needs of refugees and immigrants. Our role is to help them understand what is available to them to make referrals to our partner agencies, and as I said to help them to integrate into the rest of the community.”
In terms of what Woloshyn thinks about and worries about with regard to the future, she says finances are always a concern.
“You see so much that you could be doing, and yet you always have to make sure that you’re focusing on those activities that you can afford to provide and provide the biggest impact for the investments of the dollars that you have available,” Woloshyn says. ●
