The SPACE Project
The SPACE (Schools, Parents and Communities Engaged) Project provides mentoring and academic support for school-aged children, while offering training opportunities to the near-adults (parents and teachers) to ensure school success. The diagram below helps our parents and schools visualize CAIRO’s impacts agenda and a bold theory of change, emphasizing the big picture of what it takes to improve outcomes for our African immigrants’ youths in Oregon’s public schools.
The focus on building the capacity for our K-12 programs reflects a belief that moving “the small gear” is critical to achieve a collective impact. We emphasize that addressing one outcome (e.g., higher graduation rates) in an attempt to improve outcomes for our youths requires the engagements and thus the support of both parents and wider communities. Doing this requires commitments to new partnership structures designed to support the collective seeing and learning needed for schoolteachers and leaders to arrive at solutions that break down all forms of barriers for refugee youths and families’ success.
The STEAM Project
Special Education students oftentimes go to intervention classes in place of arts classes (technology, art, music, etc). The same also applies to students performing below grade-level in math and reading. This can mean a missed opportunity for engaging these students in a meaningful way. CAIRO’s STE(A)M program was created to address the particular need among the African immigrant and refugee (AIR) students for additional resources in STE(A)M. This means both addressing their academic needs and providing them with exposure and paths to STE(A)M careers. These additional resources combine the strengths of both Western STE(A)M knowledge (the societal context in which these students are learning and living) and the African knowledge systems (the cultural resource these students have particular access to). Moreover, that intersection itself is emphasized, allowing us to capture the power of diverse modes of students’ understanding.
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Oregon Youth RISE Project
The Refugee and Immigrant Social Enterprise for the youth seeks to integrate positive youth social and emotional learning, with community engagement, and entrepreneurial workforce skills. Numerous studies show that today’s young people are highly motivated to generate positive social change (Lewis, 2016; Punadi and Rizal, 2017). We believe that social entrepreneurship has great potential to mobilize our youth to engage in efforts to achieve major social objectives, including employment creation, poverty reduction, inclusion and integration. The Oregon Youth RISE seeks to instill a sense of agency, build social capital and equip our youths with resilience and skills necessary to sustain effective action and critical engagement in our community and beyond.
Youth Mentoring & Leadership
Our multi-level mentorship program is aimed at supporting young people to manage their own learning in order to maximize their potential, develop their skills, improve their performance and become citizens with value. We believe that every young person deserves a chance to participate in development and this can only become a reality when they have the right skills and a platform to engage. Our mentorship program’s aim is to harness leadership opportunities on personal, career and entrepreneurial development through linking aspiring youth to accomplished youthful leaders for empowerment through both the formal and informal mentoring.
We connect the youths by connecting them with young adults, adults, and professionals. Youths are matched with mentors, who depending on the individual needs may have had similar life experiences, barriers, share a common cultural heritage, or interests or goals in life. Appropriate measures are put in place to ensure that our young people are supported to meet their goals.
We provide support to youths to:
- Increase their chances of life and career success
- Reduce the likelihood of becoming involved in high-risk activities
- Enhance educational performance through academic and career guidance.