Giving Compass' Take:

• Immigrant communities in the U.S. are making face masks as part of a community response to COVID-19. 

• How can donors support immigrants during this time?

• Learn how immigrant workers are essential right now but also some of the most vulnerable during this pandemic.

Rising Village started after founder Lisa Tresch visited Ghana and saw the need for self-sufficient opportunities for women in the country. She returned to Tulsa and eventually started Rising Village Foundation, which works with immigrant and refugee women across ages and countries of origin. Participants come from various locations, including Venezuela, Peru, Poland and Myanmar. Surprisingly, Tulsa is home to a large minority group from the Chin State in Myanmar – formerly called Burma – who have relocated to Tulsa as refugees.

Tresch said the team at Rising Village was initially unsure if they wanted to pivot to making face masks.

“About a week after schools and our classes were canceled, we received two requests from people in the healthcare community asking if we could make a batch of face masks for them,” she said. “We weren’t sure if this was a direction we wanted to go. Then one of our instructors was at a local store in the fabric section and a doctor was buying interfacing to make his own mask since his hospital was running low. At that point we decided that there was a need out there we could fill.”

She notes that the masks are simply filling a gap for healthcare workers; they are not standard hospital masks, but they are four layers and include instructions on how best to use them so they will be effective.

“There is a lot of controversy around cloth masks right now, but I see it as ‘making do’ during wartime,” she said. “Our supplies may not be perfect, but things are chaotic right now and we are throwing a small lifeline to these healthcare workers until help comes. We have tried to respect the requests of each hospital for what they want in a mask, and we are careful to sanitize when packaging them.”

Read the full article about immigrant communities giving back during coronavirus by Kristi Eaton at Shareable.