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Promoting the health & well being of African women & their families in Minnesota |
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LETTER FROM MAWA'S EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AND BOARD CHAIR For MAWA, 2008 was a year of important accomplishment in helping to advance the well-being and self-sufficiency of African women and girls. At the same time, the past year has also been a time of emerging challenges for the African community presented by the economic recession. The hard economic times that we all face has an even greater impact on African women and girls. Ironically, in a time when funding resources are harder to come by African refugee and immigrant communities have especially great needs. It is very unfortunate that several African women serving organizations with which MAWA has worked closely have ceased to operate in great part due to the current economic crisis. MAWA's Board of Directors and Staff takes great pride in its dedication to advancing the needs of African women and girls in Minnesota by providing pioneering programs, collaborating with African and mainstream providers, and offering a strong advocacy voice. MAWA will continue to work tirelessly to bring our community together to maintain current programs and to, whenever possible, develop new programs to meet the pressing needs of African women and girls. MAWA continues to change and grow in response to what African women and girls tell us are the unaddressed and emerging challenges and needs that are most important to them. As a key example, MAWA sought and received additional funding from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement in 2008 to establish the Minnesota African Women's Sewing Cooperative. This program will advance the economic well-being of women and families that face especially great barriers to self-sufficiency. As a further example, MAWA introduced the African Community Health Center to fill a gap in crucial family planning and reproductive health services in partnership with Planned Parenthood. In 2009, MAWA will seek funding to implement the Amakolo Program to affirm and support young African women ages 17 to 21 to succeed in their transition to adulthood. Despite the challenges of the economic crisis that include fluctuating funding for some core and essential programs, MAWA's Staff, volunteers, and program participants continue to see the tremendous value and reward that come from our efforts. This value and reward is continually reflected in the many success stories of the African women and girls that participate in MAWA Programs. It is reflected in the story of the many women who are escaping domestic violence, overcoming social isolation, and finding new direction and self-sufficiency in their lives by attending college or accessing job training programs and gaining employment. The value and reward for MAWA's efforts is reflected in the African girls who we see come to life before our eyes, who express new found hope for their futures, and who are setting their sights high with goals for college and careers. This happens for the girls as they overcome isolation and take pride in their African culture and in their personal accomplishments and new skills in dance, arts, and education. It happens for the girls as they learn through experience that they can accomplish whatever they set their minds to do. It is reflected in the many African girls who decide to postpone sexual involvement and that become the first members of their families to attend college and pursue professional careers. It is these success stories that keep MAWA firmly on track as we enter the seventh year of our service to African women and girls. With the continuing support of community volunteers and community funders, MAWA will seek to bring these new opportunities and the hope for a positive future to a growing number of African women and girls. MISSION MAWA's mission is to promote the health and well-being of African refugee and immigrant women and their families in the Twin Cities area through research, education, advocacy, and programming. To meet this mission, MAWA empowers Pan-African African women and girls to develop the knowledge, skills, support, and access to resources to gain independence and assure their health and well-being as they build new lives and resettle in Minnesota. MAWA's programs are specifically designed to help African women and girls who face major challenges because they are socially isolated, oppressed, and in crucial need of resources to connect, integrate and seize opportunities. WHO MAWA SERVED IN 2008 In 2008, MAWA served 759 unduplicated individuals. Of those served:
PHILOSOPHY AND KEY STRATEGIES
STATEMENT OF COMMUNITY NEED While resettlement and gaining independence is difficult for all local immigrants, it is more dramatic and highly challenging for African women and girls. Based on the experience of African organizations, a good estimate is that more than 75 percent of African women in the Twin Cities are living in poverty or near the poverty level and about 60 percent are unemployed. To further complicate an already difficult process of resettlement, the practice of undervaluing African women and girls that is common in Africa is continuing in the United States. These practices include outright discrimination of girls in favor of boys, partnering of girls with older men, female genital mutilation, spousal abuse, and generally expected subservience of African females to males. As a major additional impediment to their independence and cultural integration, Twin Cities' African women and girls report that they are frequently victims of domestic violence or sexual assault. African girls in Minnesota are experiencing major difficulty in school reflected in low levels of academic achievement and elevated school dropout rates. Many of the traditional cultural supports for girls that were present in African countries have disappeared in Minnesota. African girls are rarely involved in extra-curricular activities and are socially isolated and struggling with identity issues. MAWA's 2008 PROGRAM ACCOMPLISHMENTS DIRECT PROGRAM SERVICES AFRICAN WOMEN'S PROGRAMS African Women's Empowerment (AWE) Program. With a grant from the Federal Office of Refugee Settlement, the AWE Program went into full gear during the second full year of providing comprehensive support and services for more than 300 African Women. The participants are from West Africa, primarily Liberia, as well as East Africa, primarily Somali and Ethiopia. AWE provides the unique comprehensive program African women refugees need to successfully resettle in the Twin Cities' area including increased employment and economic self-sufficiency, and to live lives free of domestic violence. AWE programs include intensive one-to-one support, advocacy, and service coordination from staff, mutual self-help and mentoring from other African women, and group and individual education and skill building. The project coordinates and assures access to a wide range of existing community resources capable of serving African women and fills gaps in services where needed. AWE assures that African refugee women and their families are able to meet their basic needs for food, clothing, shelter, and short-term income assistance. The project is helping women to gain increased self-sufficiency through acquiring education including participation in ESL, literacy, GED, and college programs, receiving job training, employment, and job seeking services, and support in gaining jobs. In addition, the women are receiving support to access social and mental health services, gain citizenship, access child care and transportation, eliminate domestic violence in their homes, and overcome social isolation through participation in community cultural and social activities. The project convenes a monthly educational and networking breakfast forum to provide knowledge and skills that are crucial to promoting African women's independence and successful resettlement. These forums also provide crucial opportunities for mutual social support and networking. During 2008, the educational focus of the networking breakfasts included trainings on: Civic Participation; Education and Employment; Domestic Violence, and; School Involvement.More established African women from the community also serve as volunteers and mentors to provide program participants with key skill building, education, and personal support. Staff also provides participants with one-to-one support in all the above topic areas to further develop and apply what they learn to their own needs and situation. The Program Coordinators provide program participants with assistance with goal setting and intensive hands-on services to advance their successfully resettlement and self-sufficiency. These services include education, support, advocacy, skill building, case management, referrals, and on-going follow-through contact and support. These services assure that women access the range of social, educational, employment, health, and practical services including transportation and childcare they need for success. To assure access for all African women, the services were provided at five office and satellite locations and in community locations on an outreach basis. Staff often accompany and support African women to obtain services at the outset to teach them directly about systems, services, and how to successfully access and use services. African Women's Network. In addition to the networking meetings for refugee women provided through AWE, MAWA brings together all African women for regular networking opportunities. Many of the participants are professionals. The meetings help connect African women with one another, build support for women new to the community, and develop solutions to common problems faced by African women. In addition, the program creates a forum to promote mentoring by professional African women who are more established in the community for women who have more recently come to Minnesota and for younger women and African girls. SUCCESS STORY AFRICAN GIRL'S PROGRAMS African Girls Initiative for Leadership and Empowerment Program. The African Girls Initiative for Leadership and Empowerment (AGILE) Program served more than 100 socially-isolated and significantly under-served Pan-African girls ages 8 to 18 through a network of five AGILE clubs. The clubs meet weekly during the school year and are instrumental in teaching African girls to believe in themselves, to set goals, and to never give up. For the girls, AGILE is the first opportunity they have to participate in an extra-curricular program, explore career options and choices, develop leadership skills, learn about African cultures, and develop mediation skills. The clubs are crucial in serving to: affirm Pan-African girl's bi-cultural identity and build their self-esteem; broaden their horizons through exploring new interests, going on field trips, and building new skills; develop positive social skills and new friendships, and; cultivate leadership and goal setting/attainment skills.
Some of our AGILE participants on the Honor Roll at North View Junior High To ensure consistent participation, AGILE presents a lively curriculum that entertains while teaching. Participants go on field trips to colleges or other events like the Festival of Nations and African Student Nights at Twin Cities' colleges. Fun activities such as dancing and performing before crowds serve several roles - ensuring the girl's participation because they have a great and cultural love for dance, building cultural pride as they see audiences admire their dancing, and serving as a tool to embolden them to stand and speak before crowds without being shy. The field trips also serve a dual purpose - the girls experience fun and friendship at the same time that they build an aspiration for attending college and having professional careers when they see African students in college. Summer Day Camp. For the fifth consecutive year, MAWA provided a 3-week Mini-Day Camp and retreats in the summer for Pan-African girls ages 8 to 12. These programs provide a continuity of summer experiences offering social connection, skill building, and personal growth for young girls. Pan-African Pregnant and Parenting Teen Girl's Group. This weekly education and support group was provided for 17 Pan-African girls at North Vista Education Center (District 287). The group helps the girls to: learn about effective parenting; build social skills and self-esteem; make plans to finish high school and pursue college attendance, and; focus on how to avoid future unplanned pregnancies. Teen Power. This program is designed to address a key issue for African girls: with the transition to living in Minnesota, African girls are no longer receiving sexuality education from their elders as formerly built into the traditional structure of life in African countries. In the fourth year of this partnership program with Planned Parenthood, the Teen Power Program empowered 12 African teens to become active peer educators around healthy sexuality, positive relationships, and pregnancy prevention. The program is highly popular with its African teen participants. The teens participated in a six-session training to learn about healthy sexuality and relationships, assertiveness skills, building self-esteem, and how to be effective peer educators. Following the training, each girl provided 30 or more of their peers with sexuality and relationship education, thus reaching 360 more African teens with the acquired knowledge. The goal of the peer education is to prevent unwanted pregnancies and support healthy relationship choices.By serving as peer educators on an on-going basis, the girls also build their social and leadership skills and self-confidence. School Navigation Project As part of a five agency collaborative, MAWA provided School Navigation services that empowered more than 50 West African parents in 2008 to become actively engaged with their children's schools and in supporting their children's school success and educational aspirations. MAWA's School Navigator works with Liberian students at North View Junior High in Brooklyn Park and their parents. The work of the School Navigator greatly increases the involvement of Liberian parents with their children's education. The School Navigator does this by organizing monthly parent meetings/trainings at school and providing advocacy, support, and education to parents, students and school faculty. This activity mobilizes parents to be involved in parent/teacher conferences and other school events. The activity also helps assure student involvement and integration with the school community, including increased enrollment in extra-curricular activities and access to school-based services. The 5-agency collaboration includes CAPI, Oromo Community of MN, Slavic Community Center and Pillsbury United Communities (lead agency). The partners are implementing similar models tailored to the need of their respective cultural communities. In fact, thanks to the school navigator role, many African parents now have email accounts. Most parents asked the school navigator to teach them how to navigate the internet and assist them set up their first email accounts. HEALTH PROGRAMS African Outreach Health Center. Offered through a close partnership with Planned Parenthood, the Health Center fills a crucial gap in services by providing no cost culturally specific family planning and reproductive health care for African women and teens. Introduced in 2008, the Health Center is especially important as a response to the very high rate of HIV/AIDS in the Twin Cities' African community and the heightened risk of pregnancy among African girls. To offer the clinic "on wheels", Planned Parenthood health professionals come to a community-based location to provide privacy, confidentiality, and accessibility for African women, men and teens. The Health Center provides family planning education, pregnancy testing, birth control options, HIV testing, testing for other sexually transmitted infections, and birth control options. The program also provides key education and personalized counseling on pregnancy prevention and HIV prevention. The center's services have been very well received by the community. The growing demand for services has led to expanding the weekly clinic from two to four hours. HIV Awareness Day.
HIV/AIDS Awareness Poetry Contest winner, Jenneh, receives big hug from keynote speaker, Dr. Bosola Akinsete, M.D., MPH, while other AGILE contestants, Girls' Leadership Coordinator & MAWA Executive Director look on. On March 8, 2008, which is the National Women and Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, MAWA organized an HIV Awareness Day event for the African Community attended by 200 community members, including a significant number of both adults and youth. The purpose of the event was to build awareness about the very serious problem of HIV infection and AIDS in the African Community and provide educational messages on how to prevent HIV infection. The education included spoken word and dance presentations by the AGILE girls and presentations by an African doctor and an African woman living with AIDS. EDUCATION PROGRAMS Outreach Education for Community Service Providers. During 2008, MAWA continued to provide important education for mainstream social service, education, and health providers to increase their understanding of the needs of African women and girls and improve the provider's effectiveness in serving them. In 2008, MAWA Staff provided the following trainings: two sessions for a total of 40 teachers in the Roseville Area Schools; a workshop at the Center for Families for 50 professionals on how to affectively serve the mental health issues of African refugees who have experienced the serious trauma of war and conflict and life in refugee camps, and; an additional training for 50 Dakota County Staff on the mental health needs of African Refugees. Third African Women in the Diaspora Conference The bi-annual conference was held June 20th and 21st in Minneapolis. The full-day conference involved speakers, panels, and presenters who addressed pressing issues that currently face African women. Educators, social workers, diversity officers, legal advocates, students, and health and social service providers gained best practices on how to interact with and serve African women and their families. The areas covered include health and education, socio-economics, and youth development. RESEARCH Research on the Harms of Second Hand Smoke. With funding from ClearWay Minnesota and in collaboration with Wilder Research, MAWA is carrying out the first local community research project to examine the needs of African women, girls, and children related to secondhand smoke. The research findings will be used to raise awareness in African immigrant communities and inform action to reduce the harmful impact of tobacco exposure among women, girls, and children. The project has carried out focus groups with African girls and interviews with African women to learn about: (1) their experiences, knowledge
and understanding of tobacco control messages on secondhand smoke, and (2) identify beliefs, cultural norms, and anything that has prohibited
them from protecting themselves against the harms of secondhand smoke exposure. The initial results were presented at an African Women's
Summit on Secondhand Smoke on November 15, 2008. MAWA Future Plans and Aspirations MN Women's Sewing Cooperative.
With a recent three-year grant from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, MAWA will launch the Minnesota Women's Sewing Cooperative in January 2009 to promote the economic self-sufficiency of African women. Through experience with the AWE Project, MAWA has learned that a significant group of African refugee women in the Twin Cities are much more vulnerable to remaining in extreme poverty. This is due to the exceptional set of social, cultural, and religious barriers they face towards employment outside the home. The Minnesota African Women's Sewing Cooperative will provide these recent African refugee women with the opportunity for greater self-sufficiency, job training, and employment in an area of work and with an approach that they have indicated will address the major challenges they face to employment. The project will build on the strong tradition that African women have of using their hands for sewing, knitting, and other handicrafts. Operating 40 hours a week, the sewing cooperative will be organized as both a productive work site and job training site and as an environment with a uniquely African flavor to provide an empowering social environment for African women. Child care will be provided while the women are working at the cooperative. The project will provide all program participants with training courses in sewing. One group of African refugee women that face major barriers to working outside the home will gain the opportunity to earn supplemental income to improve their families' standard of living by making clothes, African dressed dolls, African themed hairdressing salon aprons, scrubs and other products through the sewing cooperative. They will also gain important increased social contact with other African women. Another group of women will gain job training and education experience in the American work culture and work ethic through the Sewing Cooperative site. They will also gain job seeking skills and support that will lead to employment in full-time jobs. These employment opportunities will represent a major improvement in their wages and families' standard of living. A small number of women will gain business development skills and consultation to develop their own home-based business. AMAKOLO Program. In 2008, MAWA will actively seek funding for the high priority new AMAKALO Program that will promote successful life passages to adulthood for African girls ages 17 to 21. This program addresses the crucial need for a rites of passage initiative to fill the loss of traditional cultural practices that formerly supported young women to move successfully to adulthood. Within the new context of life in Minnesota, this program will replicate the essential aspects of the traditional rites of passage ceremony blended with other knowledge needed for a successful American adulthood, such as, financial literacy, civic participation, etc. In keeping with the traditional practice, the participants in the Amakolo Program will be initiated into adulthood through lessons and discussion with African "aunties" and "big sisters" on the obligations of adulthood while receiving the knowledge, skills, and affirmation to fill those responsibilities within the new cultural setting. Seminars that include experiential and group learning will provide the young women with knowledge and skills in: African culture and values; navigating womanhood and adult living in a manner that integrates African values with the demands of American culture; goal setting; thorough exploration of college attendance including planning for and financing a college education; career exploration; financial literacy, and; civic participation. To reinforce what is learned and to build self-confidence, the young women participants will share the knowledge and skills that they learn with other African girls. The young women will participate in group activities that focus on promoting solidarity, cultural pride, and a sense of community. Activities will celebrate African culture and art, promote community involvement through volunteering, and prepare participants for the coming-of-age celebration through African dance, song, arts, and crafts. The young women will participate in a Passage Retreat and be affirmed in their communities as adult women through a celebration and recognition ceremony. MAWA will seek to incorporate the 30-hour Teen Power Program into Amakolo. Planned Parenthood has lost the source of funding that was previously available for Teen Power. Maintaining this very popular and effective program is a high priority for MAWA. Maintaining the full range of AGILE Program activities. A portion of the funding for the critical African girl's programming has been lost due to a number of factors that include the impact of the economic recession and changes in some of the past funder's priorities. MAWA will be very active in seeking funding to assure full services for African girls. Seeking funding to maintain the African Outreach Health Center. While the African Community has shown great enthusiasm for the Health Center, Planned Parenthood has not been able to sustain the funding source that it previously received to provide this partnership program. MAWA will seek funding to maintain the center that is addressing a key gap in family planning and reproductive health services for African women and teens. Expanding African Arts/Cultural Activity. MAWA will seek to develop cultural arts activities to give African women and girls additional opportunities to perform African song and dance. Despite being home to a large and vibrant Pan-African community of 53,000, the Twin Cities' area lacks a professional African song and dance performance ensemble. Restoring African musical traditions is important to empowering African women and girls. African people in Minnesota are underserved in terms of a lack of opportunity to experience their own cultural forms of expression. In addition, mainstream Minnesotans have a very strong interest in African song and dance and yet have relatively few opportunities to attend African performance. Past performances organized by MAWA over the past 5 years have been well-attended.
Secondhand Smoke Conference. Following completion of the secondhand smoke survey, MAWA will seek to hold a conference that will bring key stakeholders together to plan for collaborative action around secondhand smoke in the African Community. Income generating activity for AGILE participants. The African girl participants are interested in using their talents in singing, dance, and arts and crafts in a community event that will generate income to support MAWA's girl's programming. MAWA STAFF Staff bios
AWARDS IN RECOGNITION OF STAFF CONTRIBUTIONS
MAWA'S 2008 FUNDERS Altrusa Club of St. Paul
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