Leadership Training Curriculum
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IMMIGRANT LEADERSHIP TRAINING CURRICULUM by Eric Cohen Juliette Steadman and Rufus Whitley 2000 Edition Copyright 2000, Immigrant Legal Resource Center 1663 Mission Street, Suite 602 San Francisco, CA 94103 IMMIGRANT LEADERSHIP TRAINING CURRICULUM by Eric Cohen Juliette Steadman Rufus Whitley Immigrant Legal Resource Center ABOUT THE AUTHORS AND THE IMMIGRANT LEGAL RESOURCE CENTER The Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC) is a support center to legal services programs, community agencies, teachers, social service providers, and pro bono attorneys handling immigration cases and conducting immigrant community organizing throughout the United States. The ILRC has conducted immigration training programs for many years and has published numerous practitioner and volunteer manuals on immigration issues. Eric Cohen is a staff attorney with the East Palo Alto office of the ILRC. He worked for two years with the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO Labor Immigrant Assistance Project (LIAP) in Los Angeles. He has been a staff attorney with the ILRC since 1989 and has co-authored several ILRC publications. Juliette Steadman teaches elementary school in Washington D.C. Before moving to Washington, Juliette was a teacher with the Ravenswood City School District in East Palo Alto, California. She also worked as a part-time staff attorney with Centro Bilingue in East Palo Alto where she coordinated their family visa and naturalization projects. Juliette worked for two years with the ILRC as a staff attorney under a Skadden Fellowship. She holds both a law degree and a teaching credential. Rufus Whitley graduated from Stanford Law School in 1994. He practiced law in San Antonio, Texas with the law firm of Goldstein, Goldstein, and Hilley. Rufus has Masters Degree in Education and was a high school teacher and principal for seven years before entering law school. Rufus is also a Catholic Priest, a member of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. UPDATE TO THE IMMIGRANT LEADERSHIP TRAINING CURRICULUM Since the original edition of the Immigrant Leadership Training Curriculum (formerly called the Leadership Training Curriculum), which the Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC) published in 1994, there have been many changes in immigration law and the rights of immigrants. The anti-immigrant rhetoric which many politicians and some other people have been using to scapegoat immigrants has increased dramatically. The need for immigrant leadership in all facets of civic affairs has never been more apparent than now. Thus, this manual and other immigrant leadership training programs have become increasingly important. In fact, since the original training upon which we designed this manual we have held two additional leadership trainings and approximately 25 new immigrant leaders have graduated from the program. These leaders have gone on to become active civic participants in their communities. In addition to training the new leaders, we held an advanced training for those leaders who already went through the leadership curriculum. The advanced training allowed the leaders to experience what it would be like to be trainers for the next group of leaders in the curriculum. The leaders who participated in the advanced training then became co-trainers for the other groups of leaders going through the curriculum. This mentoring approach helped the veteran leaders improve their skills and impart their wisdom upon others. The advanced training included a new part of the curriculum called "Civic Action Projects" or CAPS. CAPS are small-group campaigns chosen, designed, and carried forth by lay leaders as a means of addressing problems facing their communities. For example, a CAP might aim to improve the recreational services available for immigrant youth in the community, or it might aim to promote the hiring of more bilingual faculty and staff in the local school district. CAPs provide a forum for leaders to utilize the various leadership skills covered in the basic training while they work on a campaign which addresses real problems within their communities. The ILRC would like to thank Antonio Maciel of the Open Society Institute's Emma Lazarus Fund for providing the funding to update this manual in both 1998 and 1999. For years Antonio has provided great ideas about how to work with immigrants in their quest to become civic participants and become more powerful in the U.S. Special thanks also go to Jon Blazer who works at Philadelphia Legal Assistance and Virginia Ruiz who works at California Rural Legal Assistance, for their creative suggestions and hard work on making this curriculum significantly better. Jon and Virginia were the ones who, as third year law students at Stanford Law School, developed the idea of CAPS and wrote Units 12 – 15 of the curriculum. We also would like to thank all the leaders who went through the training program over the last few years for their dedication to the program, the cause, and for teaching us at the ILRC so much about how to do our job better. Additionally, I would like to thank my co-workers at the ILRC for their support for and suggestions on this project. Lastly, I thank Juliette Steadman, former director of Centro Bilingue and my partner on this curriculum, who really put this training program together in East Palo Alto and kept it running for over three years. We hope you enjoy this manual and its update and find them as useful as we have. If you have any questions, comments, input, or ideas about the curriculum, we encourage you to contact Eric Cohen at the ILRC by phone (415-255-9499, extension 264) or email ([email protected]). Thank you. December 1999 Eric Cohen, San Francisco, California INTRODUCTION TO THE TRAINING CURRICULUM A. Summary of the Curriculum The curriculum in this manual employs interactive teaching techniques with the goal of helping a group of dedicated community leaders improve their leadership skills, use such skills in their communities, and help others apply for naturalization. The central focuses of the curriculum are to help immigrants refine and develop their advocacy and leadership skills and to teach them how to help others apply for naturalization. Thus, teaching immigrant members of the community lay advocacy (also called lay leadership) skills and how to help with group processing of naturalization applications are the two featured parts of the curriculum. So, what exactly are lay advocates?1 Lay advocates are community leaders or others who live and work in a given community (in this instance, immigrants living in the immigrant community) and help others in the community with their legal and civic problems. They not only work with people in their own community but also serve as representatives of the immigrant community to the larger community. They can advocate for individuals or on behalf of the community before school boards, governmental agencies, and with politicians. They share skills and knowledge with others in the community, volunteer at community agencies which help immigrants, and reach out to others in the community. The idea behind helping more people become better lay advocates and leaders is that more residents in a given community will become more self-sufficient and knowledgeable and powerful about their rights. Group processing of naturalization applications is an effective and efficient way to process a group of naturalization applications at once. It allows the applicants the opportunity to learn about the naturalization requirements and application process, complete their own application forms, and gather the supporting documentation for their own applications. This is all done under the supervision of volunteer lay advocates from this training and immigration law experts from a community agency. It is best to look at this training curriculum as having two basic parts. The first part, the original training curriculum, consists of the first 11 units of this training. The second part, the advanced training, consists of units 12-15. Units 1-11 take between 30 minutes and four and a half hours to teach assuming there is a group of approximately 12 lay advocates and there are co- trainers present to do the more interactive parts of this training. Although teaching the entire curriculum take at least 31 hours, some people may want to teach only selected units from the curriculum. It is designed so people can teach all of it or merely part of it. For a sample schedule, please see Appendix Intro-A. 1 Throughout the curriculum the term lay advocates, lay leaders, and leaders are used interchangeably. Intro-1 The first part of this manual (this introduction and units 1-11) takes people through three phases of the training program. First, it gives input on how to choose lay advocate volunteers to be students in the training. Second, the manual takes trainers through all the steps necessary to teach the curriculum. This includes an explanation of all facets of the training curriculum and of the philosophy of the training, as well as the suggested homework assignments for a successful training. Third, the manual discusses ways to help the leaders use the training they learn in their communities. For a list of all the homework assignments, please see Appendix Intro-E. The skills which the first 11 units of the curriculum teach includes: public speaking, outreach, running a meeting, developing an agenda for a meeting, holding a press conference, completing applications and helping others complete applications, acting as a resource on different issues,