Giving Compass' Take:

• T.L. Hill Group profiles of community efforts in New Hampshire to encourage productive immigrant integration. 

• How are these communities similar to and different from your own?  What could these types of programs look like in your area? 

• Read the companion piece to this article: Immigrant Integration: Promising Practices.

When the Endowment for Health launched the New Hampshire Immigrant Integration Initiative in 2014, it aspired to engage immigrants in all domains of community life – economic, social, political, cultural, educational and others – in the Granite state. Today the New Hampshire New Americans Loan Fund is financing small business start-ups, thanks to a strategic partnership initiated by leaders in Concord. Conversation Cafés and Welcoming Week events in Manchester are bringing together long-time and new residents. In the Lakes Region, a young foreign-born boy attended his first soccer camp last summer, and in Nashua the Latin Hispanic International Fútbol Association (LHIFA) has expanded to engage over 270 children, youth, and adults playing the sport in a family league as an outgrowth of this investment. At the start of this initiative, achievements like these were envisioned. Four years later, they are the result of ongoing hard work carried out by local collaboratives in four towns that are beginning to change the way New Hampshire welcomes immigrants. The Welcoming Concord Initiative, Welcoming Lakes Region, Welcoming Manchester, and One Greater Nashua are working earnestly to foster two-way integration between new Americans and their receiving communities.

A collaborative field-building community of practice, the NH Immigrant Integration Initiative (NH III) attracted additional support from the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation and United Way of Greater Nashua. With leadership from the Endowment for Health, these investments reflect the recognition that immigrants are important to the future vitality of New Hampshire. As stated in the initiative’s request for proposals, immigrant integration is defined as an intentional effort that engages and transforms all community members, both native born and newcomers, in reaping shared benefits and creating a new whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. With funding that totaled $1,035,404 from 2014-2018, and countless hours of in-kind support from volunteers in all four communities, the initiative has generated active networks of people in each town for welcoming immigrants and refugees, and it has fostered a community of practice with statewide reach that builds upon Welcoming New Hampshire.