From translation services to emergency funds, the Immigrant and Refugee Center of Northern Colorado helps people navigate COVID-19
Gov. Jared Polis visits the Immigrant and Refugee Center of Northern Colorado Saturday, July 11, 2020. He met with community navigators Yoana Rivera Pineda and Idriss Siyat, and executive director Lisa Taylor, and to learn more about how the IRC is working to help clients navigate COVID-19. Photo by Kelly Ragan.
By Kelly Ragan
In the early days of the pandemic, Idriss Siyat spent a lot of time explaining why people should use hand sanitizer, cover their cough and start social distancing.
But that didn’t stop him from getting sick.
Siyat is a Somali community navigator at the Immigrant and Refugee Center of Northern Colorado. He’s from Kenya, but he speaks Somali, English and more. His illness exposed how much his skills are needed at the refugee center: He had to undergo a painful quarantine of two weeks without seeing anyone, including his parents, who also became sick, and his siblings.
“It wasn’t good for me not to see them,” Siyat said.
He usually helps folks fill out forms, translates documents and advocates for them. As COVID spread in Weld County, and especially at JBS – where many IRC clients work, including Siyat himself – things changed.
He couldn’t meet with clients in person. He made phone calls that often went unanswered, as navigating technology can sometimes be a challenge for IRC clients, he said. One client, he said, needed help setting up her internet so she could do her classes over Zoom. Once he recovered, he went over to her house to help set it up, with Director of Advocacy Collin Cannon walking them through how to set it up over FaceTime.
Idriss Siyat, community navigator at the Immigrant and Refugee Center of Northern Colorado, speaks with Gov. Jared Polis Saturday, July 11, 2020. Photo by Kelly Ragan.
But the extra work caused by the pandemic didn’t stop there. In fact, it’s still going on today, as workers such as Siyat scramble to translate complex medical terminology for clients and help them stay safe even with all the ever-changing guidelines in addition to all the regular tasks.
Lisa Taylor, the center’s executive director, said inequity and injustice are exacerbated in a crisis. Barriers related to socio-economic status, language, technology and more are highlighted now, but they existed long before COVID came into the picture.
“What we absolutely don’t want to do is make it seem like the immigrant and refugee communities are less adept or less resilient,” she said. “In fact, we see resolve and resiliency – we see relentless optimism. But it’s objectively the case that when hardships are happening for all of us here, those are felt more intensely by our more vulnerable populations.”
IRC tackles language barriers during public health emergency
In non-pandemic times, Cannon said in an interview with the NoCo Optimist, the refugee center plays host to many in-person English classes. The community navigation team works with 12 different languages, usually helping folks find primary care providers, figuring out how to apply for asylum, navigating a change in residency status and more.
“Because of the language barrier, we end up being this catchall service agency,” Cannon said. “These communities need to be served, and they won’t be served otherwise.”
In 2018, President Donald Trump’s campaign sent out a mass text message to folks across the country, including some clients, to test the emergency alert system.
“It was a complete mess at our center,” Cannon said. “Many couldn’t read the message and didn’t understand why they got it.”
Cannon said he started to ask how the refugee center could better communicate with non-native English speakers about important emergency information.
About two years ago, Cannon went to Weld County to ask what could be done to create a multilingual text system to better communicate important information.
While the county thought it was a good idea, it also noted it would be expensive to implement such a system, Cannon said, though he never saw a cost estimate from the county.
It’s not that the county wasn’t interested in the service, Cannon said, but the cost was a big factor in why the county didn’t move forward with the idea.
So Cannon worked to figure something out himself using a program called SlickText.
When the IRC gets important information, community navigators translate it and send it out across the network – which, Cannon said, is about 300 people – in hopes those people will tell other community members about what’s going on.
Right now, that means updates regarding public health, Cannon said, but it could also function during other types of emergencies, such as a mass shooting.
IRC offers financial relief
The refugee center has also been working to raise money for clients struggling to stay afloat during COVID.
Since the IRC launched a COVID relief fund, made up of a mix of public and private dollars, it’s been able to help 137 different households by issuing an average of nearly $800.
“A lot of my clients were affected (by COVID),” said Yoana Rivera Pineda, a Spanish Community Navigator. “Either they can’t work or they lost their jobs. Many of my clients don’t qualify for many other resources out there, so the IRC has been able to help in one way or another.”
Yoana Rivera Pineda, a community navigator for the Immigrant and Refugee Center of Northern Colorado, spoke to Gov. Jared Polis Saturday, July 11, 2020. Photo by Kelly Ragan.
Undocumented immigrants can’t apply for unemployment, and many other relief funding is tied to immigration status, Rivera Pineda said. But there are no strings attached to IRC’s relief dollars.
“We usually help with utilities and rent,” Rivera Pineda said. “We’re mainly helping people pay their bills.”
Roseline Mugaruka is the Women’s Empowerment Coordinator with the IRC.
Many of her clients have been going to work throughout the pandemic. Many weren’t happy about the conditions they’re working in, she said, but there was nothing they could do about it.
“One client I was talking to, he and his wife both work at JBS,” Mugaruka said. “There’s only so much they can do to prevent virus spread. They have six kids. He kept saying, ‘I don’t want to kill my kids. It’s one thing for me to get sick and get over it.’”
Another IRC client did bring the virus home, Mugaruka said. His mother got sick and she died. He felt guilty, she said. To make it worse, no one could really come to the funeral.
On July 11, Gov. Jared Polis stopped by the refugee center for a tour and to learn more about the organization. He also made stops at the High Plains Library District and the University of Northern Colorado before heading off to Fort Collins as part of a bill signing tour.
Both the center and High Plains Library District received grants from the state’s COVID Relief Fund of $35,000 and $21,00 respectively.
The bigger picture
Even as businesses begin to reopen and life begins to look more like it did, vulnerable populations won’t be able to simply snap back to normal, Taylor said.
“If you’re in a place of living paycheck-to-paycheck, losing wages is exponentially more of a hardship,” Taylor said. “I don’t think the immigrant and refugee communities are experiencing something brand new as a result of COVID, but it has intensified the issues of access and inequity.”
Lisa Taylor, executive director of the Immigrant and Refugee Center of Northern Colorado, speaks with Gov. Jared Polis Saturday, July 11, 2020. Photo by Kelly Ragan.
While the funding has been able to help clients stay housed and fed, Taylor said, the organization was built to help people develop literacy skills, apply for jobs and get promotions all aimed at achieving financial security.
But at the end of the day, Taylor doesn’t want immigrant and refugee communities to be seen as a charity case. After all, a large swath of the those communities were deemed essential workers.
“It’s no small thing that a number of our immigrant and refugee neighbors are keeping things going in food, manufacturing and agriculture,” Taylor said. “They are working hard every day to make sure we have what we need to move forward.”
To learn more
To learn more about the Immigrant and Refugee Center of Northern Colorado or to donate, go to https://www.ircnoco.org/.