Corner CAFE CoP #5: Building Bridges: Supporting Refugee Families and First Generation Students

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

All right. Welcome everyone to our Monday Corner Cafe. We are going to go ahead and share with you. We’re really excited to get started today. We have some really wonderful presenters that are going to talk to us about supporting families who are refugees and our first generation families with some great resources that we wanted to highlight for you today. So we’re going to get started. On the next slide you will see we have a Padlet that we have used every single time. If this is your first time joining us, I’ll place the Padlet in the chat and the password for that is mochalatte. And we just ask that you get in there. There’s opportunities for you to see our resources from previous communities of practice as well as our community of practice that we are doing today. We have a couple resources that we wanted to share for you for that. And then Nikevia is going to get us started with a quick little icebreaker.

Nikevia Thomas:

Yes, good afternoon everybody. Thank you for joining us and let’s get started on our Coffee Trivia. Let me launch the poll. Okay. We have four questions that we want to ask you about coffee. It’s a lot of coffee trivia questions here. Okay. Did it launch it?

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

It should have launched. Everybody should be able to see it. I can only see the answers.

Nikevia Thomas:

Yes. So there are four questions. The first one is about where the name from cappuccino originates. The second one was like the most expensive coffee, right? I’m doing this all from memory. And the third one is, what’s the third one, Jessica? I don’t remember.

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

What’s an ibrik?

Nikevia Thomas:

Oh yes. What’s an ibrik?

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

I know the answer to this. I don’t know if… I feel like some of our families that you work with probably use one. They bring in coffee.

Nikevia Thomas:

Okay. I’m curious to see how people respond.

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

Me too. Oh, people are going for the Italian choice there. All right. Are you ready to reveal our answers?

Nikevia Thomas:

Let’s do it.

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

All right. So the name cappuccino actually comes from the brown cowls that were worn by Capuchin monks, and they said that their brown tunics appear similar in color to the frothy drink we all know and love. So our second question, Nikevia and I got a kick out of this one, is the world’s most expensive coffee. And those of you who answered, I’m going to say it wrong, but Kopi Luwak, that is the world’s most expensive coffee. It can cost up to $600 per pound.

Nikevia Thomas:

$600.

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

$600 per pound, and it’s actually made from coffee beans that are eaten and then excreted by a Sumatran wild cat. So people are willing to spend a lot of money for this byproduct that’s eaten from a Sumatran wild cat. And then it is cleaned and ground. I find that to be rather interesting. And then the third one, we had to look up the pronunciation on this, but an ibrik is a long-handled copper pot made for making Turkish coffee. So those, some of you, we had about four or five people that got a couple of those rights. So congratulations on that. All right, we ready to go? You ready to keep it?

Nikevia Thomas:

Let’s go. So I am Nikevia Thomas. I’m a Senior Specialist at MAEC, and I work on the CAFE team for the Maryland projects and a lot of the, well, all of the interstate work that Jessica and I put on. And I’ve been with MAEC for I think since October of 2019. Jessica?

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

And I’m Jessica Webster. I reside in Pittsburgh and am a Senior Family Engagement Specialist with CAFE and we primarily work with… I primarily do work with Pennsylvania, but I help out with the Maryland State Family Engagement Center as well.

Nikevia Thomas:

All right, let’s get going. So we are at MAEC are champions of innovation, collaboration, and equity. And that drives all of what we do here. So let’s go over the agenda. Jessica, did you want to talk about-

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

Sure. So we have two topics that we’re going to talk about today and then we’ll have time for our questions and closing. We are going to start with Sloane Davidson from Hello Neighbor, and she’s going to talk to us about the work Hello Neighbor does in the Pittsburgh region, actually beyond, to support incoming refugee families and give us some insight onto how educators can support families. And then we invited Jenny Portillo back who is going to do some work with us on resources around supporting first generation families. So Jenny joined us for our first meeting. Actually those of you that missed it can see the recording of that, but we have a lot of rich information and discussion and we felt it was worth diving a little bit deeper into some of those things.

So next slide please. So as we get started, just a couple quick reminders for you about Zoom etiquette. We will not be using the raise hand function, but if you do have a question, you may put it in the chat box or a comment. And we also have a section in our Padlet and we’ll be sure to put that link in there again. But if you have a question, you can also place it in the Padlet under the what I wonder. And towards the end, we’ll have some time to answer some of those questions for you. Next slide please.

And then if you need live transcripts or closed captioning, please hit the CC icon at the bottom of your webinar screen and that will turn on the closed captioning or turn off the closed captioning, depending on which one you prefer. All right, next slide. All right, so we’re going to tell you a little bit about us. MAEC serves as the statewide Family Engagement Center for both Maryland and-

Nikevia Thomas:

Here we go.

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

You got it.

Nikevia Thomas:

Mouse froze. So we want to share a little background information with you about MAEC. And so MAEC was founded in 1992 as an education nonprofit dedicated to increasing access to high quality education for culturally diverse, linguistically and economically diverse learners. MAEC envisions a day when all students have equitable opportunities to achieve, learn and achieve at high levels. Our mission is to promote excellence and equity in education to achieve social justice. And a little bit about who we are as CAFE, a project of MAEC. CAFE is the Collaborative Action for Family Engagement, and we are a statewide family engagement center for Maryland and Pennsylvania. We are the only statewide family engagement center that serves two states. We help build sustainable infrastructure to support healthy family, student, and community engagement. CAFE serves all educators from state agencies to school districts to school staff and early childcare providers and families to promote high impact, culturally responsive family engagement. That’s us.

And we’ll just go over very briefly the purpose of our Community of Practice. So the Corner Cafe Community of Practice is designed to create cross state collaboration between Maryland and Pennsylvania, so we can also network and share resources and strategies. This was something that was developed for practitioners by practitioners. We have a steering committee that is comprised of practitioners at every level from the school on up to the district. And we emphasize strategic, integrated and comprehensive family engagement priorities from the Maryland State Department of Education and Pennsylvania Department of Education with our focus being equity and inclusion.

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

All right. So with that, let’s jump into our first topic for the day. Our first speaker today is Sloane Davidson and she’s going to talk to us about supporting refugee families. So next slide, please. Sloane is the founder and CEO of Hello Neighbor, which is a nonprofit organization that was created in 2017 that works to improve the lives of refugee and immigrants by matching them with dedicated neighbors to guide and support them in their new lives.

 

Prior to starting, Hello Neighbor Sloane worked for 15 years across the intersection of philanthropy and social impact marketing. She currently sits on the board of Resolve Network an NGO based in the Democratic Republic of Congo that focuses on jobs for women in post-conflict countries through microfinance and the prestigious Lilly School Women’s Philanthropic Institute. Previously, Sloane was a Kiva Fellow in the Philippines and has been invited to speak on our activism at the Clinton Global Initiative and the World Economic Forum.

Sloane has a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Economics from the University of Vermont and a Master of Public Policy and Management from the University of Pittsburgh. Of Ukrainian and Croatian descent and a proud Pittsburgh native, Sloane returned to her hometown in 2015, and she currently lives in the Highland Park area with her husband and two sons. So Sloane, thank you so much for joining us today. We are really excited to share out the amazing work that Hello Neighbor is doing, and to learn a little bit more about supporting families who are refugees in the United States. Thanks for joining us.

Sloane Davidson:

Thank you so much for having me. Hello to everybody. It’s such a thrill to be here today. I recognize a few names and definitely some organizations. So really, really honored and excited to be here today. And oh, even someone live tweeting it, which I thought was pretty fun as well. So thank you so much. You can go ahead and next slide please.

So as I sort of talk about Hello Neighbor and the work that we do and what led me to this work, as a native Pittsburgher, was someone who lived away and worked in a lot of other countries, I moved back when I was six months pregnant with my first son, and a large portion of moving back to the area was to have that support of my mom, my sisters, my aunts, and my grandma, and I suppose some of the men too. And I just couldn’t shake the idea that so many people around the world forced to flee from their homes, have to leave that support system behind and what that means for them.

And so while much of my early career was focused internationally on international development, I took this hyper lens and hyper-focus right here to the Pittsburgh region, but this would count for communities all across the county, the state and the country. And I wanted to understand who are our new neighbors, how do they get here and what does that look like? And so to kick things off, one of the things that I really learned is that a refugee, you can go to the next slide please, is a person who has crossed at least one border and is in another country.

So the way that I like to say it for people who don’t know what an internally displaced person is, someone who’s internally displaced is within their own country. So if you had to leave New Orleans in Hurricane Katrina and you ended up in Houston, you are not technically a refugee. You would have been internally displaced. That means that you still have all the protections of your own country. And yes, it might be hard to rebuild. You might be targeted or persecuted being in another part of your own country, but you are still within your country.

Once you cross a border, you’re not automatically considered a refugee, but you could apply for what we call refugee status. And a refugee left their country because they were in danger because of war, persecution, I would add climate change to that list. I would add any host of issues that make your living conditions so unbearable that you would be forced to leave. And that truly is what it is like. I imagine that everybody on this Zoom has… think about your families, your immediate family, your extended family. Some people are the kind of people that are like first ones out, trouble’s a brewing, the storm is coming, the conflict is coming, we’re going to pack up and go for safety.

Some people want to wait until it’s closer to right on top of you. Is it serious enough that we have to go? And then you’ll leave. And some people are like, “I’m going to stay. If my house collapses on me, if the war comes, I don’t care.” And so everyone really does have to make that choice for themselves. But almost everybody, if you ask them, “Would you leave?” They would say no, because they are around extended friends and family. They are in a place that they know. And for so many of the refugees around the world, we’re not talking about people who are flying on planes or have a lot of resources. These are folks that are walking on foot that are maybe riding in small vans, pickup trucks, and are really making a very incredibly difficult decision to leave where they are.

The third definition is that they cannot return to their country without being in danger again. They’re either not allowed to return, they were disowned or disavowed by their government, or the safety concerns are so great, the climate concerns are so great that they would be unable to return. Next slide please.

So I can say that over the past year, the number of forcibly displaced people worldwide did top over a hundred million for the first time on record. This slide from UNHCR is now undercounted from where we’re at, which is so interesting how quickly the number has grown. A lot of the current migration is due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has prompted the worst refugee crisis in Europe and in the world since World War II. There’s a lot of countries of conflict. Not all of them make it onto the news, but other places would include Ethiopia, Myanmar, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And there’s just a lot of other displacement trends that we see.

So currently of the 100 plus people that are forcibly displaced, most people are in a neighboring country. So if we had time to take a poll, which I don’t have today, but I would ask all of you just to pause for a moment and put a country in your head or you know, you could drop in chat if you want, but put a country in your head of where you think the largest number of refugees live. Give you a moment to think about it.

Jordan, Turkey, increasingly Poland and neighboring country, and some people once they cross that border, might choose to stay there. They might say, “It’s been hard enough to get here. Maybe we’ll be able to return home one day. I’m going to stay here.” Another category of people are going to say, “This isn’t right for me right now.” If you go to the next slide, please. And a lot of the reason they’ll say, “This isn’t the right place for me right now,” is because maybe the country that they’ve traveled to is now almost double in population. In the case of some countries in the Middle East, what they saw in the war in Syria and now with Afghanistan is that there are some school… Some kids aren’t able to make it to school. The schools are too full. In some cases people are in refugee camps, but not always.

In some cases people can’t find employment, but not always. In some cases schools have to run two shifts. We’ve heard of school places that run a morning and then an evening because they just can’t accommodate the amount of children. There’s a lot of times people are being persecuted, treated poorly, safety and just seeking a better life. And so these are the top countries where we’re seeing refugees come from. This is not asylum seekers, this is not other people working through migration issues. There’s a few things that I would say are inevitable in this world, and one of them is migration. People have moved since the dawn of time and they will continue to move. So there is a real conversation around migration tied to war and conflict, and then there’s a conversation tied to migration that’s just people moving. If you go to the next slide, please.

So, there’s a lot that to be said for how refugees reach the United States and it does start overseas. So when someone applies for refugee status, it takes on average five years for that status to be approved. I’ll give you a really salient example. When I started Hello Neighbor in 2017, it was around the same time that the Rohingya crisis was starting in Myanmar. And I clearly remember right when I was starting, so many inquiries I was getting because at that point in time in spring 2017, it was top news story, front of the papers. That was what people were talking about.

And I would receive so many messages, “We’d love to help Rohingyan refugees. How?” Now we did have Burmese refugees and people from Myanmar here, but they were from a previous conflict. And so I would say, “Well, they’re not here yet. They’ll get in queue and there’s a lot of international steps that need to happen. Last week, Hello neighbor welcomed our first Rohingyan family to Pittsburgh. This week we have the second, next week we have the third. It’s been six years.

So it is an incredibly long journey in terms of the international pieces that need to come together from UNHCR. Some people just say, “Put me anywhere but here.” Some people say, “I have a connection in Germany,” and Australia, in Canada, in the United States, in any one of the 12 to 15 countries that have really formal processes and a lot of other countries within informal processes in order to become a refugee. But once you are sort of assigned to the United States, things sort of change. So someone can be waiting quite a long time, but once they get into the vetting process, there’s security checks and there’s about 12 federal agencies that work across the vetting process at least to come to the United States.

And each is a step in the process with a time box on it to either move forward or not move forward. That goes all the way through health checks, in some cases retina scanning for eyes. There’s interviews where you’re asked time and time again who you know, who you’ve spent time with. I often say for any of us who struggle, what we had for breakfast the last couple weeks, imagine talking about every relationship, coffee, dinner meeting that you’d had in over the last five years? So it’s incredibly… a lot of scrutiny that goes into that and a lot of trips to this place.

We have a Rwandan mom who had left Rwanda in the genocide, gone to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, war breaks out, she goes to Burundi, she goes to Namibia, she goes over somewhere else and starts the process finally in Kenya to become a refugee. And she had to be able to disclose all of those country crossings even if times and dates weren’t as culturally appropriate to her. And she also was a single mom with a couple young kids who was working and she had to find time to take two buses about once a month for a long time to be able to go and have these follow up meetings. So it really, really does take a lot.

And then once you’re finally assigned to a country, you arrive and start what’s called a 90-day reception and placement program. That means within your first 90 days, that’s where the bulk of your services will be found from resettlement case agencies, there’s nine federal agencies called VOLAG’s or voluntary agencies that are responsible for all of the refugees in the United States. And in those nine, there’s about 130 sub affiliates or sub offices. And so Hello Neighbor is one of four refugee resettlement offices here in the Pittsburgh area. And the first time we might hear about an arrival is usually about two weeks, not more.

We get bio data, which is the gender, the age, and any major health concerns and country of origin for a family. With that, we have to find housing, we have to think about how we’ll get kiddos enrolled in school and health appointments and everything else going with a very, very limited amount of time. But we do not have any direct responsibility on what happens overseas or really in that vetting process. Next slide please. So talking a little bit about refugees in Pittsburgh and what that looks like, this is a map and the way that I would say it is that we do see a lot of people moving, especially when their cultures are new. So from those of you who are joining from Pittsburgh or thinking about where you are, here we have neighborhoods where they’re known to be traditionally Polish neighborhoods, Irish, Italian.

That didn’t happen on day one, that happened over the course of decades. And so that is also what you see in Pittsburgh. The Bhutanese community has been coming the longest in bulk of sort of this new wave of refugees since 1980 and they’ve settled on a certain part of the South Hills. This country list is just a glimpse. Hello Neighbor currently serves individuals from 26 countries of origin and we know that our public schools when they ask about language of origin have over 75. So there really are people speaking a lot of different languages.

English learning language is not as a second language because as I’m sure all of you know as educators, many of them are coming in and English is not their second language, but their third or their fourth or their fifth. Next slide. One of our new arrivals shared something with us that was really beautiful. We like to say in terms of the Hello Neighbor support, but also the support that anyone can give in helping their new neighbors build a more comfortable and confident life for themselves. We are like seeds, new arrivals in the United States. Before the seeds can have roots, we need support and resources. Hello Neighbor gave us that support. Next slide please.

Thank you. This is a video that we can share and I think I’ll be able to share some links to watch everything after, but we in particular wanted to show some firsthand accounts. And so Lena that is in a few of our programs and we then hired her as an interpreter, shares a bit of her journey being a mentee in one of Hello Neighbor’s core programs. Next slide please. So when I first created Hello Neighbor, our core mission… Oh, we can do it. If it’s too hard to those in the background that are navigating my slides with our Monday complexities, I’m happy to move on to the next slide.

Nikevia Thomas:

Can you all hear the slide? I just wanted to make sure you could hear. You couldn’t? Okay, that’s-

Sloane Davidson:

Sorry about that. Yeah.

Nikevia Thomas:

No, no, it’s fine. Let me try it again. Let me incorporate the sound. There we go. Here we go. And we’re back.

Lena Cantane:

Hello, my name is Lena Cantane. I was the refugee in Namibia. Me, my husband with my three children, we applied for the resettlement. The process, it was not easy. The process took some two years from Namibia. We traveled to South Africa and from South Africa we came to New York, and New York was our port of entry. Then from New York, we came to Pittsburgh. Getting the citizenship, for me it was like a dream. Whenever you complete five years so that the moment you have to start applying for citizenship.

We went through the desk there. It was some reading, writing and also questionnaires. When I got the citizenship, I was very, very happy. I knew that other things, they going to change. I did not even see that it was long. The process of being a refugee, living in a refugee camp for years and years because I lived there for 13 years. For me it was like I’m already at the end of getting what I want. I was lucky to have my mentor. She helped me a lot in the process. They said there are some cards, you can read through the card instead of reading in the booklet. Sometimes it’s boring. She went to look for the card, she was still looking, but I found it before her and I told her that I found the card. Oh, okay. Now it’s okay. I’m grateful to Hello Neighbor because Hello Neighbor supported me through this process.

Sloane Davidson:

Thank you so much. Next slide. So just a little bit transitioning into Hello Neighbor and what we’re about and then I’ll save time for a little bit of questions. The overview of the organization as I first created it was to support our new and recently resettled refugee immigrant families by matching them with dedicated neighbors to create impactful relationships and guide them in their new lives. And our vision is really how do we help support creating a welcoming, inclusive and vibrant Pittsburgh and United States whose new neighbors can realize their dreams of success in prosperity. We aspire to see communities where everyone is valued for their diverse perspectives and are empowered to rebuild their lives with dignity and respect. Next slide.

So that first family mentorship program’s the one on the left, and that was the impetus for me first creating Hello Neighbor with this idea like a Big Brothers Big Sisters, but for refugee families. From the early success and I mean that from everybody, from the families we were supporting to the mentors, to everyone around Pittsburgh that was just excited about this idea and that it hadn’t been done in this way before, we were able to from there build some other programs.

So we have a program called Study Buddy. I have another slide on that I’ll get to in a moment since we’re all educators here. But we also have Smart Start, which is supporting pregnant moms and babies. Our new federal contract to do director settlement and then a national program for network. Next slide please. So the goal of Study Buddy’s program is to support immigrant and refugee students navigate online learning, stay motivated to do their work and attend class and empower them to build relationships, ask for help and actively plan for their future. We’re working with middle and high school students from around the county. It is a mostly virtual program for a lot of our kiddos that their parents want them home at the end of the day and they’re not good fits for other afterschool clubs or activities.

And so they meet usually once a week to twice a week for those sessions. But then we also bring in guest partners, guest speakers. We increasingly are doing some external fun events and also some meaningful team building events for a lot of the youth. And in the next slide you’ll see some of our early impact. So we’ve worked with over 77 students and 69 tutors. We’ve done about 2,000 hours so far and that’s just in three semesters and we’re doing about 80 hours of instruction a week. And of those, 82% of students sign up again. Seeing that enthusiasm from them has been really great.

We also increasingly were giving out Chromebooks. In the COVID years they got those from schools and then as that ended, some districts didn’t continue that and so we raised some funds to directly being able to support the digital literacy requirements of the program, but then also where an individual student might be at with technology. And the next slide, I’ll share a little bit on the impact of mentorship and of a little bit of what this looks like. So we currently have folks from over 11 countries, we have over 18 languages spoken. And what we really see as the number one is time together.

So we have mentors that are individuals, young couples, families, retirees, empty nesters. We have mentee families from all over the world that are making Pittsburgh their home. And what we’re really looking at is about 10 hours a month for a six-month commitment, a six-to-eight month commitment. And what we really talk about is do what is right for both of you. So sometimes that might be sharing a meal, doing a craft project, helping someone navigate forms or enrollment or understanding something. It could be helping them with a library card, helping them find a playground or an inexpensive place to shop.

There’s really so much that our new neighbors could use some help with. And more than anything else, they talk about having an American friend. So mentor might not be the language that a lot of them use, but they will say that they’ve connected with an American friend to help break the social isolation that is all too real for our new neighbors. I used to have to pause here and talk about social isolation and how it was so damaging. I think as educators you all… and as just a person living in this time, we’ve seen what that’s like with COVID. We’ve seen the impacts of social isolation. So just imagine that if you don’t share the same language, culture, and don’t have any existing friends or family or support systems in the region that you’re moving to site unseen. And that’s really where our mentorship program comes in.

On our next slide, we’ll talk about the impact of Smart Start. This is our program for expectant moms and babies. We’ve really learned so much about how to support moms experiencing childbirth in this country for the first time. What I meant to say on the last slide as well is that those kiddos are navigating the U.S. education system for the first time. And it can be daunting, all the different apps for parents, but even things like wear green for St Patrick’s Day or get a good night’s sleep and breakfast in your belly for standardized testing or school’s canceled for a snow day. It’s more than just the school part. It’s all the rest of it that make kids feel comfortable. And that’s the same lens that we apply here on Smart Start. So some of our moms are moms before, but all of them are giving birth for the first time here.

And navigating healthcare in our country is hard. And when you take on language and culture, it’s really difficult. So we are supporting moms in a very culture first, human first, refugee first way, all the way from their early appointments, getting them doula or any other support that they need all the way through babies being born and supporting any moms that are experiencing loss of which we’ve seen quite a few, any NICU or really early births and what that looks like, and then help navigating baby once they’re home.

We have volunteers for this program and all of our programs where we’re really helping bring together the cultures and bring together Pittsburghers. In resettlement, we’ve helped to resettle just to this region the last year, over 217 individuals. It’s about 64 families and a lot of them did come from Afghanistan last year. We’re increasingly seeing cases from Sudan, from Syria, from Venezuela, from Colombia, from Myanmar, Rohingyas, and a lot of other countries we expect to see.

The big goal here is getting people into housing, into jobs and getting them set up for success and self-sufficiency as quickly as possible. I wish that we had more time. I wish they had more time to work through the trauma that they’ve experienced and we work a lot on trauma with them. We work a lot on secondary trauma for my staff, but ultimately the way that our country and system is set up is get going. And so we try and help with that support as much as possible, but that’s also why we have the mentorship program and Smart Start and Study Buddy so after this initial period is over it’s not a cliff and we can continue to provide a lot of other supports.

As I look to wrap up, I’m just sharing in the next slide some ways you can join us. So you’re welcome to go to the Hello Neighbor website, helloneighbor.io. You can also go directly to get involved where you can see all of the different ways to get involved. We recently redid it. I love the remodel and it has a section for like I want to do something one time. I have one hour to give. I want to do something recurring. So we’re trying to really help map what we’re hearing from our volunteers in terms of how they want to get involved. We also love to see donation drives. There’s so many things that we require to families and the more we get donated, the more direct cash assistance can go directly to them. We have community co-sponsorship teams that are helping our case managers navigate and we’re always looking for partnership opportunities in addition to housing and employment referrals.

In the next slide, some specific volunteer opportunities include transportation support, grocery shopping, airport pickups, housing setups, childcare events, sorting and organizing, donations and tutoring. There’s always a lot of ways to get involved and I always say the best time to get involved is today and the next best time is tomorrow. So we’d love to hear from you if this sparks either for yourself or to share within your trusted circle of your peers. On the next slide, we talk a little bit about how to make a difference where people can donate directly. We also have a monthly donor program called the New Neighbor Collective that shares some special stories and outreach that we give to our monthly donors and we always are looking for grants and funding opportunities, sponsorships and more.

The next slide I can talk about a little bit. Staying informed. So across social media we’re @helloneighborhq. We’d love to hear from you. And lastly, as I look to wrap up, you can always reach out at info@helloneighbor.io with any ideas you have. Our volunteer coordinator Aubrey checks that every day and helps navigate the inquiries as they come in. A few other big things to put on your radar is specific to Smart Start. We have our next volunteer training at the end of this month. At the end of May, on May 21st, we have a potluck here in the Pittsburgh area for all of our community members and new neighbors to come out to. And in the fall on September 10th here in Pittsburgh, we have our big annual fundraiser called Home Suite Home. So with that I’ll end my presentation slides and then welcome to hear more from any of you. Thank you so much for your time today.

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

Thanks, Sloane. I was thinking through your presentation when we’re talking about families coming and possibly spending, I think she said 16 years in a refugee camp, but I know the family that we help support spent an awful long time in a refugee camp before they came over. Thinking about that link then for school districts when they’re getting these families that they’re welcoming these families into their communities, can you think of a couple things like quick tips or things to consider that we may not consider as we’re welcoming these families?

I’m even thinking about something as simple as I called for on behalf of our family, I called the school district to inquire about the ingredients that were in the cookies at school because they were a family that didn’t eat pork. And the mom was obviously understandably extremely concerned to make sure that her son wasn’t being given food that had pork products in it. But just some of those things. What are some things that are common that you wish schools knew as they were welcoming these families to make it easier?

Sloane Davidson:

That’s a great question. I guess before I jump into idea mode, I would say for anyone working in or with a district, check to see if you have the RSIG grant, that’s Refugee Services Impact grant, I think. I get so many acronyms in my head sometimes. But there’s a lot of resources that any district or county that has the RSIG would provide. If you have ELL services either individually or through an AIU, there’s things that you could provide. And I would say ask students directly that have already been here, what kind of peer support they might suggest or get a way to involve your communities. I always think that’s a great way to start. That being said, I would definitely focus on religious holidays. So a lot of kids are fasting right now for Ramadan. That means that they’re not eating from sun up till sundown.

They might start as young as nine or 10 because they want to, not because it’s pushed on them, but younger siblings that look up to older siblings will start younger and that just makes it hard to concentrate. So is there a prayer space or quiet space or even a resting space for kids? I always think about what messages are going home translated and what translation or interpretation support do you have. A lot of our parents at the beginning were not going to back to school nights, participating in parent-teacher conferences. And I found out through asking, they just didn’t know. They don’t come from countries where that’s common. They don’t come from places… This is not everybody. Everybody is different. You know one person, you know one person. But for a lot of people, countries and other folks, you don’t advocate the way Americans do, right? We’re always saying, “Well, what about this? And how’d my kid do this?”

They don’t have that. And a lot of countries that come from especially dictatorial or non-democratic countries, they’re thinking of educators as people in positions of power and that might feel uncomfortable, but they might be intimidated. And so we just do things like how can we help get them to the table, how can we help get the parents there and get them engaged in what their kid kiddo is doing. And I would say the same thing as involved with kids. We talk a lot to families when they first arrive. It’s called cultural orientation. We’re required to do it. And we’ll talk a lot in there also about sanitation.

A lot of parts of the world, they might not wear deodorant or they might not have fluoride in water and teeth are an issue. And so one of the things that I really think about is how can we value the child for who they are, keep their name from their country, speak their language at home, love where they’re from, but not have them stand out in a way that will make them targeted for bullying or just be… Kids just want to be part of the classroom. So how do you look at that child and figure out what supports they need?

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

Thank you. Any other questions? I know we have a couple comments about that it was eye-opening to understand how long the process is for refugee status and the immigration status coming over here and learning more about your program. Does anyone else have any other questions? We’re small enough that I think it’s okay to come off mute or you can place them in the chat if you… anything. Okay. Well, if not, Sloane, we have your information and we can share that out again. And I really appreciate you taking the time out of your ultra busy schedule. I know all the things you’re doing and so we appreciate you taking the time to join us today.

Sloane Davidson:

Well, I want to thank you so much for inviting me into all of you here. You do an incredibly hard job, which has helped shape the future for so many. And so just really wanted to show my appreciation for everything. I know that the days are short and long and springtime can get even harder to navigate with kids. And I would just say for so many of our refugee and immigrant children, they’re the first ones, and so there’s so much for them to learn. If I may, I’m going to leave you with a quick story and then sign off. But I was invited to an Iftar dinner, which is the breaking of the fast during Ramadan on Friday night with a Syrian family from an early cohort in mentorship. So I hadn’t seen them in a little bit. And I get there and we have a lovely dinner and we’re sitting around drinking Turkish coffee afterwards.

And the mom and dad, they’re from a rural part of Syria, so not a city. They don’t have a lot of education. And even though they’ve been here six, seven years, their English is only okay, it’s been hard. Dad, really what was expected for him was to get enough schooling to be able to function in the world, which in a lot of parts of the world is about fifth grade. And then to go and work with his family. And for mom, the expectation was mostly to get married young and have kids, of which she has five.

He sat me down with his children and said, “Tell my children that Bs are not acceptable.” And I said, “Well, let’s… Hard work doesn’t always help with that.” And he was going on and on about all he wanted for them was their education. And they are mostly making As. English and world history is hardest, which if you think about it, because they can’t turn to their parents and ask them to read over a homework. Those parents don’t know about Kumon or any other kind of additional tutoring support. That’s why we have Study Buddy, but it’s only one support system.

The kids might not be good at asking their teachers for a little bit of extra time or support. All of those kids that have been here about five years want to be doctors or lawyers. One of the ones wants to be a forensic pathologist, which I told her means she’ll have to do both. Dad was so committed without even knowing yet or understanding that role that he would play, but all he wanted was for that chance for his children that he never had.

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

Yeah, and that’s really powerful. We talk about that a lot, about that whole sense of academic socialization and how that is so important for families to have that role and how schools can help support that and encourage that, right, because it’s so powerful. And so here you have a family that within a generation is really finding educational success here and that’s really, really exciting and powerful.

Sloane Davidson:

Yeah. Excellent.

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

Thank you so much. Thank you, Sloane.

Sloane Davidson:

Thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of your day today. Take care.

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

All right. And with that, let’s jump into some resources that our very own Jenny Portillo has found for us. Nikevia, can you pull the slide back up? The slide show. All right, so another wonderful colleague of ours that some of you may have had the opportunity to hear speak with us before was gracious enough to come back and meet with us again. Jenny has over 10 years of experience within the public education sector. She serves as our Senior Equity Education Specialist for MAEC, and she primarily works with the Center for Educational Equity, although we pull her in whenever possible with our family engagement work.

Jenny provides technical assistance and training for state departments of education district and schools to improve instructional practices, student engagement and family community engagement to create supportive learning environments for all learners. Throughout her career. Jenny has worked as a dual language and general education teacher, teacher evaluator, instructional coach, professional development facilitator and curriculum designer. She holds an Educational Master’s in School Leadership from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Master’s of Arts and Curriculum and teaching from the Teachers College at Columbia University as well as a BA in English and History from Fordham University. So Jenny, thank you so much for joining us today, and we are so anxious to hear what you’ve brought to share with us today.

Jenny Portillo:

Thanks so much for the introduction and thanks for welcoming me back everyone. We can go ahead and go to the next slide. So I actually want to start by saying that I myself am a first generation student and a first generation American in this country. Both my parents immigrated from their home countries in the ’80s. And so for me there’s a very personal stake in supporting first generation families and even those that come in following generations as well. And the main goal of the resources I’m going to be sharing with you is this idea of authoring and positioning engagement.

Many times families who are new to the country or new to the American education system really don’t have an understanding of how the school system in the US works, or based on their own previous educational experiences or the cultures of where they come from, don’t feel that it’s their place to come into schools and say what they want to say in terms of their engagement because they defer to teachers and administrators.

And so it’s really important for us in that support family engagement and caregiver engagement in schools is to make sure that families understand how the system works and that they know that it’s okay for them to express what they know and what they want, and for families to engage as framers, not just receivers of school structures. And so many times families are told how schools expect them to participate. And families that have been in the United States or that are from the United States originally and have schooling experience here, know that it’s okay and actually good to ask for more.

But many families that are new to the country and new to the US school system don’t know that it’s okay to ask to be involved beyond attending a PTA meeting, to parent-teacher conferences, or a back to school night. And so it’s really important that we let families know that they have the right to be listened, to be valued, and to be understood. And really this comes from a type of thinking that’s called the ecologies of parental engagement. And really what this approach asks is that educators address barriers to engagement by considering questions such as whether families are able to access the education system that might be unfamiliar to them, how they might navigate this system if they speak a different language, or how they might engage with schools when they don’t feel that they’re being heard or feel like they might be seen as a trouble parent, which is something that is very familiar to many families.

So really what this approach asks for is a fundamental shift in how we understand family and caregiver involvement in their children’s education. It’s really helping families to consider the hows and the whys of their engagement and how it relates more broadly to their children’s experiences in school. So successful family engagement is really the result of this process where families and educators interact and really think about how they can leverage all of these assets and capital that they bring to really engage in the full life of their child’s school.

So one resource, if we can go to the next slide, that MAEC has developed to really help families and to educate them is called Adelante! or Moving Forward. And I’ve included the link there. This is a free resource available on our website, and this resource is really geared towards school systems and family advocacy organizations, even community organizations as well that can help families learn more about what their rights are under the Every Student Succeeds Act, which really spells out what the rights are of immigrant parents, of parents and caregivers of English learner or multilingual learner students.

There’s lots of legislation that offers guidance around their rights and the things that they should be entitled to. But many times families and caregivers are unfamiliar with these, which means that they have trouble advocating for their children within the school system. And so this guide is really meant as an informational training tool. And I’ll go over how it’s set up, but really it’s to help provide parents and parent leaders, caregivers with a user-friendly and accessible model of information that allows them to know what their legal rights or responsibilities are as well as what they need to hold schools accountable for. All right, next slide.

So the topics that the publication covers includes students’ rights, and this includes the rights of multilingual learner students to be properly identified to receive appropriate instruction and how they can exit programs. It also covers what the rights are of students, family and families and caregivers of students who are immigrants or English or multilingual learners. It includes information around the rights and responsibilities of schools around translation/interpretation, services, and it also covers information that families should know around special education as it pertains to students who are multilingual or English learners. Next. Click again. Thank you.

And so the way that the guide is set up is that it first presents a scenario, which I’m going to share one with you in a moment, that highlights a key issue around one of these topics. It offers reflection questions that are related to the scenario, and then it offers a couple of pages on key information about the rights that relate to that scenario to educate families and caregivers. And then it comes back to more reflection questions to help families process the information they just learned. It also offers some next steps that they could take if they were in a similar situation and offers lots of resources and additional information beyond what’s already there.

And so what the target audience for this sort of kit would be are organizations and groups working with immigrant parents or families and caregivers, parent leadership programs, schools, or any other organization whose goal it is to educate immigrant parents. And so it’s not meant as a guide that you would print out and hand to a family, it’s really meant as a shared learning resource. And we will jump into the next slide. So what we’re going to do now is sort of do a look inside of the guide. And so if you all were sitting in a parent organization group or a community organization or even a school, we might host an evening where we do sort of a shared teach-in around this guide and zoom in on a particular scenario and resource.

So this is not something that you would run all the way through. You could break it up into individual sessions or maybe do two in a single evening or teach-in on a weekend. So it’s a really flexible resource. And so you would have to think about in your context what might it look like to implement it. But here’s our first scenario. So we have Karina Alvarez is 12 years old and attends a middle school. She lives with her mother and two younger siblings in a small apartment in the city. Her family speaks Spanish at home, and as a single mother raising three children, Mrs. Alvarez works two different jobs to support her children. Karina’s a naturally good student, but she does not enjoy school and has very little motivation to go to school each day. Her teacher knows that if Karina really applied herself, nothing would be impossible, however, with Mrs. Alvarez’s busy schedule, it’s hard for both women to meet and talk about the ways that they could help Karina excel.

So if we were rolling this out with you all as families engaging in this, we would start you off with this resource we would offer. This guide is currently available in Spanish as well, but can also be translated. And so we would have families engage in the scenario. And then after reading it and having them process it, we would go onto the next set of the next component of the guide, which are the reflection questions. So we would present the questions and have families take the time to either write in their responses or to discuss in small groups to help them process and make it accessible.

And so I’d love to sort of engage in that practice here. So if we were in a group as families learning about our rights through this resource, the first question we would have to talk about is what are some of the obstacles that parents like Mrs. Alvarez face in supporting those children’s success in school. And why should Karina’s mother get involved and what kind of positive result can be achieved through Mrs. Al’s involvement? For the sake of our little scenario here, I’d love to hear from you all on the second question: Why should Karina’s mother get involved with the school? So if we were families or caregivers, that would be a question we might discuss. So feel free to unmute and share with us why Karina’s mother get involved with the school in this situation.

Cynthia Grace:

This is Cynthia Grace, can you hear me?

Jenny Portillo:

Yes, please. Thank you. Go ahead.

Cynthia Grace:

Well, the beauty of it is that her mother is the essential partner in their child’s education. And you know what? Her mother was her first teacher. So the beauty of it when the mother and the school have a relationship, it’s genuine and they can find the best things for that child and how to help that child overcome any obstacles. But then we have to look at her mother works two jobs. Okay, can we do text? But then how do we text with the translation?

Jenny Portillo:

Yes.

Cynthia Grace:

So there’s all these opportunities and all these possibilities. There’s no such thing as problems, only solutions.

Jenny Portillo:

Thank you for sharing, Cynthia Grace. Yes. And some of those points that Cynthia Grace raised might be exactly what a family or caregiver says. They might say, “Well, I’m my child’s first teacher.” They might say, “Well, this can be a little bit challenging, but you should still try because there’s still opportunities here.” Kelly, I think I had seen you unmute as well. Please feel free to share out on either question two or any of the other questions on the slide here.

Kelly:

Yes, hi. Absolutely. I agree with Cynthia Grace on that as well. The parent is the child’s first teacher. So I think if the child sees that it’s important to the parent, it’s going to become important to the child. If the child sees that the parent, and although Mrs. Alvarez here in this example, it’s a very busy mama, single mom, two jobs, three kids, I think if her child sees that education is important and this is a way to further yourself in life, then she’s going to try harder. But if she sees her mom not really care, not pay attention, she’s just going to assume education is not that important either. My mom’s not concerned about it, why should I be?

Jenny Portillo:

Thank you so much for sharing that. Yep. And that’s another thought that you might hear families or caregivers echo again, if you as a capacity builder for families was presenting the scenario and really the aim of giving them scenarios is that it might resonate with families of, “Huh, this is a situation that I’ve been in,” or, “I know of other families that are having some similar struggles.” And so the goal of the scenario is really to bring some really tough legal topics down to the level of that they’re accessible and that families will understand this is what it looks like, sounds like, feels like in my everyday life with my child.

And so we can see how this would definitely be more impactful than handing them a legal document that might be really challenging to understand or that they might understand, but not really know what it looks like on an everyday level. Any other thoughts on the scenario questions here before we move on to the rest of the resource? All righty, no problem. So again, this is a quick zoom in of how you might use this resource. So if this was an evening where we were guiding families through this, this would be the focus of our conversation. And then after discussion and processing and reflection, we would go onto the rest of the resource. Next slide, please.

And so here what you’re going to see are two pages out of the guide. And the reason I didn’t zoom in on these is because I just want you to get a general sense for how it looks. So what you would use this publication for next is then to actually walk families through their rights, now that they’ve processed it through a scenario, walk them through the benefits of engagement because again, some families might not be familiar with family engagement as something that’s okay or even desirable. And then it brings you back to the scenario questions again.

And so now that families have been educated on, nope, family engagement is actually really important, here’s what it could look like. Here are what your rights are. Now let’s go back to those initial three questions. It offers families an opportunity now to reflect, now that they have new knowledge on how they might proceed differently or how they might think differently or how it builds on their existing thinking. Then it moves into the next step. So it says, again, bringing them back to the level of everyday experience. It says, “So now that this information, what are four things that you can do for your child or in your child’s school in your community related to this?” And so here’s where you might have families say, “Well, text is hard because of language, but maybe we can have a quick phone call every so often,” or a video chat now, which is definitely something that’s more familiar to families in light of virtual learning with COVID.

Or maybe it looks like even doing a home visit or visiting a local spot in the community for coffee or something on an informal basis to get updates. And then you’ll see at the bottom there is a resources section that brings to light organizations and documents that might be helpful with links. And so again, you would do this as a module and there are several modules covering those different topics I mentioned at the beginning so that you could use this resource to help educate and build a capacity of families so they can really engage on their own terms with the school. Next slide.

And so as I mentioned, some potential uses because again, this is not a resource that you would just hand a family to navigate on their own could be organizations or groups working with immigrant families or parents, family advocacy organizations, parent leadership programs. If there are parent-to-parent networks in your schools or your districts where families support one another, this could be a resource that they work through together. You might have workshops that are led, so instead of a generic back to school night, perhaps there’s teach-in specifically around this type of information or engagement webinars. Although it says independent use there again, because there’s a lot of information that can easily become inaccessible to families, I wouldn’t recommend independent use unless you know that they’re going to receive mentorship or support around how to use this resource properly. I’d love to hear from any of you all based on your context. Can you think of any other uses for a guide like this in your particular line of work?

Cynthia Grace:

This is Cynthia Grace again. I like all these potential uses in these organizations. It makes me think of HUNAY down in Philadelphia. And when we look at relationships and we look at this mother that you gave an example, so is there a way to connect her with other families that are dealing with the same situation, so they have a support group, they have a relationships and people too that they could go to that they trust. It’s all about the speed of trust. And so when we look at that, how can we form that, but also at every school level, right, we have what’s called PSSC, parent school community councils. Each school district, each LEA has something different, but just bringing everybody together and bringing in the love and just putting the kids first. But actually meeting families and parents where they are, not where we wish them to be.

Jenny Portillo:

Love that. That’s a great way to think about it is what are existing structures, like those councils, Cynthia Grace mentioned where you can leverage a resource like this because then you’re leveraging what’s already happening at your schools and your districts and just adding another resource that can help meet the needs of a particular family and student group. Thank you for that. On our next slide to close out, this just asks the exact question I’ve asked now is I’d love to hear from more of you. Can you think of any other ways how you might leverage this kind of resource in your context to help build that family and caregiver capacity around their rights and around their children’s rights?

Kelly:

Hey, Jenny. So this is Kelly again. So we started this program at the beginning of the year called Ingles en La Escuela. We have many Spanish speaking families at our school. And a lot of the times the parents don’t want to come to the back to school nights or they don’t want to come to the school because there’s the language barrier and if we can’t find a translator, it’s very difficult. So they almost have a hesitation and a fear of coming into the school. So we started this program just to teach very simple sentences in English, like, “I’m here to pick up my child.” “Where’s the nurse’s office?” “I’m here to have lunch with my child today.” Just so that they could feel comfortable coming into the school and being able to know how to say something.

And I worked together with our ESL teacher, and we didn’t even realize this, but we’ve had one lady come every single month because she knows a little bit of English, but she wanted to work on her writing in English. And ever since she has started coming, she likes to bake. So the last couple of months we’ve been coordinating with her to actually start a business and she started a business just by coming to our classes. We were able to network with her and work together with her. And I mean, she’s starting like… She started a social media page and she’s starting things in the community and it’s like, that’s so cool because we just started with something like a simple concept of just I want to know how to communicate with my child’s school. And even she’s amazed. She’s like, “I had no idea that this was going to turn into this.”

Jenny Portillo:

That’s great. And to Cynthia Grace’s point, right, it sounds like there was a lot of trust built up there where she saw, oh, the school genuinely wants to help me and engage with me. And so if you have a resource like this and family see, oh wow, you’re actually educating me on how I can hold you accountable, it does help create that sense of trust where now I don’t feel like the school is a place that’s sort of after me. Instead, they want to work with me. And it’s okay if I give them feedback and hold them accountable on, well, you’re not offering my child exactly what they’re supposed to be receiving, or I want to engage more because it’s my right to do. So that’s really powerful. Thank you for sharing, Kelly.

Kelly:

Absolutely.

Jenny Portillo:

Any other thoughts before I close out?

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

Jenny, I was just thinking about the potential this is… I know we talked about maybe doing this live in a training session on a webinar, but I’m also wondering how impactful it might be just to even have some video vignettes. People could access them in smaller segments, but be able to access it that way for some families who might not… I’m thinking about Sloane’s, some of the family Sloane talked about who their literacy skills may also be very low, so accessing things in writing might be difficult for them even if it is translated potentially. So I wonder if that would be something that would be pretty impactful that schools could have available, just even some interactive videos that they could walk them through.

Jenny Portillo:

Yeah, interactive videos. I’ve also seen the scenarios used as role plays where they’ve actually had folks acting out the scenario in the space and have families reflect on them in that way. So, again, we remove that. The reading component is still there for anyone who wants to follow along, but it, again, brings it to the level of accessibility where families can see themselves reflected in these scenarios and in the challenges that they might have experienced themselves.

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

I like that.

Jenny Portillo:

All right. Well, I hope that this resource is helpful to you all. Again, it’s available for free on our website. It’s currently available in English and in Spanish. We hope to continue being able to offer these sorts of publications in multiple languages for accessibility. But as Jessica raised, sometimes even when something is in a language of understanding, it doesn’t mean that it’s fully accessible. And so we want to think about how to use a resource like this in flexible ways, whether it’s through role plays, video, parent-to-parent or family-to-family engagement networks as well, to build that trust. But I encourage you to take a look at the resource and if you have any other questions reaching out to us on how you might incorporate this in your practice in your particular context. Thanks again so much for having me, and I hope that this was helpful to you all.

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

Thank you so much, Jenny. We do have a little bit of time if you are able to respond to any questions. They could be problems of practice, things that we’ve been playing with for a little bit. But does anyone have any questions or comments for Jenny or for Nikevia and I about the topics that we’ve addressed today?

Cynthia Grace:

It’s just Cynthia Grace again. I just want to reach out. I just thought Kelly, that testimony you gave really touched my heart and soul and how it felt this relationship and that… See, so the schoolwork became a community and a place where people were trusted and they could bloom and thrive. And I would love to see a video of that parent and how she started her business. I would just love to hear that testimony. That would really touch me.

Kelly:

That’s a great idea. Cynthia Grace, thank you for sharing that with me. I would love to do that as well. She is a really sweet mama and she’s got, her son is here and her oldest is actually in college right now. She was an ESL student in here and now she’s in college. So just a really wonderful testimony. Our school here, we call a neighborhood school. We have about 800 kiddos within a three-mile radius of our school. So it’s just been a wonderful experience. We had no idea it was going to turn into what it did, and we’re just really excited for this mama.

Cynthia Grace:

Well, Ms. Kelly, I just have to tell you, when we invest in each other and truly believe in each other, the community just thrives. And I just love your story and I love your advocacy. You’re beautiful. Thank you.

Kelly:

Thank you so much. You’re beautiful as well. All of you here. I know you have to really have a heart for what we do up. There’s our bell, sorry. But yeah, we really have to have… This is hard work that we do here, so it really motivates me every day to just get up and be able to advocate for these students and these families.

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

And Kelly, remind us what school you’re in and your location.

Kelly:

So I work at Lexington One School district in Lexington, South Carolina.

Jessica Grotevant-Webster:

Excellent. Yeah, thank you so much for sharing that. And that’s the point of the work that we do is we’re hoping that we have some connections like that so that we can learn from each other. So thank you so much for that. That’s powerful. Any other comments or questions for the group? Okay, well with that then, I think we can share a little bit about some things that are upcoming for us. We do want to share that we are moving due to some scheduling issues. We are moving our next community of practice that was scheduled for May. We will be moving it to July 6th at 1:00 PM. If you’ve signed up for that, you should receive a message with the new date and time, and we’re hoping you’ll be able to join us for that. Our next one then will be Navigating Difficult Conversations with Families, and that will be on June 12th.

And that is a conversation where we are bringing back Chris Wolfel from a Pennsylvania intermediate unit. He was on our special education panel last time, and he’ll be bringing back some parents with him to talk about the work that they have done in that IU to really, really create this very powerful network of administrators, educators, and parents that are tackling some tough topics and really keeping a focus on the students. So we wanted to share that all with you. So please jot down those two dates. We will put the registration link in the chat for you, excuse me, for upcoming communities of practice.

And then we also have our contact information and our evaluation form for this week’s, or today’s session. And so we just ask that with the little bit of time we have remaining that you take a few minutes to do our evaluation. We do look through the evaluations and take the comments very seriously and use that to continuously improve our programming and make sure that we’re meeting the needs of educators and practitioners and families throughout Maryland and Pennsylvania. So please take a moment. I dropped the link in the chat to do your evaluation, and then once you’ve done that, you are free to enjoy the rest of your Monday and the remainder of the week. And we thank you for carving out some time from your busy schedules today to join us.