Supporting Immigrant and Refugee Children Through Asset-Based Community Programming

Providing culturally responsive, trauma-informed afterschool programming is a promising intervention to promote the adjustment, educational achievement, and well-being of newly arrived refugee and immigrant children. Connecting Communities and Multilingual Learners (CCML) is a local nonprofit organization in the Southeastern part of the United States that provides this type of programming to newly arrived families. To better understand their impact on children, CCML aimed to examine its model of programming via a mixed methods, strengths-focused evaluation. Evaluation efforts focused on describing the effects of the program on children at CCML’s flagship site in a robust urban center. Data were collected from students and facilitators at two times (beginning and end of the year) over one academic school year. Results revealed that CCML supported students’ socio-emotional well-being, English language acquisition, and cultural pride in positive and sustaining ways. Evidence from this study suggests that culturally responsive and trauma-informed programs offer promising, adaptable models for addressing the evolving needs of newly arrived refugee and immigrant youth in diverse community contexts.