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Giving Compass' Take:
• T.L. Hill Group shares lessons and promising practices learned from community efforts in New Hampshire to encourage productive immigrant integration.
• How can these practices be implemented in your community? What partnerships would facilitate the development of programs like these?
• Read the companion piece to this article: Immigrant Integration: Profiles of Communities with Promising Practices.
The New Hampshire Immigrant Integration Initiative was guided by the premise that welcoming and integrating newcomers would be achieved through multi-sector strategies. A sense of mutual responsibility would emerge by increasing cross-cultural connections, encouraging community adaptation, and fostering a shared vision for the future among newcomers and long-time residents. To assemble partners and attain meaningful community-wide engagement, local groups competed for grants to implement a 6-month planning process with key stakeholders. The RFP2 outlined several characteristics that would exemplify a Welcoming Community (Appendix A). A checklist of criteria for successful immigrant integration plans provided an overview of expectations for the initial phase (Appendix B). At the end of the planning phase, newly formed local collaboratives in Concord, the Lakes Region, Manchester, and Nashua were selected to implement the initiative between April 2014 and September 2018.
Under a competitive grant process, four successful communities in New Hampshire were awarded $10K each over a 6-month period (April 2014 to September 2014) to develop multi-sector, multistrategy immigrant integration plans. These communities formed their own local collaboratives – the Welcoming Concord Initiative, Lakes Region Immigrant Integration Initiative, Welcoming Manchester, and One Greater Nashua.
A logic model developed by the Endowment for Health (Appendix C) depicts the framework for NH III implementation from April 2014 to September 2018. The vision was that this initiative would create vibrant, secure and cohesive communities in New Hampshire where all people have the opportunity to attain their full potential. The four local communities (i.e., Concord, Lakes Region, Manchester, and Nashua) were awarded grants to implement their plans. In addition, funds supported a peer-to-peer Community of Practice facilitated by Cristina Aguilera, a consultant with the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition (MIRA) and additional technical assistance providers in evaluation, communications and messaging, legal issues affecting immigrants and refugees, and sustainability. Local communities would implement multi-sector strategies at the individual, organizational, and systemic levels to enable new Americans to achieve economic integration, spatial integration, social inclusion, and civic participation with long-time residents. In addition to local outcomes, NH III would lead to statewide systems change, thereby strengthening the field through mutually reinforcing efforts across communities at the state level.
To support each site’s unique needs, the Endowment for Health established project timelines for disbursing funds and annual reporting that aligned with progress made by each local collaborative. Every site formed its own leadership and decision-making group, governance structure, operations, and procedures for fiscal management of the grant.
Each community’s local context influenced the types of strategies NH III collaboratives prioritized and were able to implement. Local characteristics important to consider are outlined in this section.
The NH III was designed to elevate the engagement of immigrants in economic, social, political, cultural, educational and other domains of community life in the Granite state. The term immigrant integration was used intentionally to emphasize respect for and incorporation of differences and the need for mutual adaptation. A great deal of work remains to realize this goal, but in its fourth year, NH III is achieving meaningful community impact.
Practices profiled in this report reflect areas of sustained interest and capacity based on each site’s distinct local context, leadership, and volunteer expertise. State level promising practices featured in this report are those implemented beyond a single site or identified by other sites as practices they seek to replicate or adapt in their communities. The NH III did not utilize a formal research or evaluation process to identify promising practices, nor were practices vetted using a common set of objectively determined selection criteria. Instead of engaging a panel of expert reviewers to verify evidence of success, this report draws from self-reported firsthand accounts by site members and NH III technical assistance providers.