Open Borders Project is a 501 c (3) organization committed to empowering and educating low income families who are residents of Philadelphia. Our organization was founded in 2001 as an initiative of Christ and Saint Ambrose Episcopal Church, located near 6th and Venango streets in North Philadelphia. Our constituents enroll at Open Borders to learn the language and technical skills essential to employment. We focus on training local leaders, while also offering services such as computer courses, GED, and English and Spanish classes. We also run a Youth Radio Project, which combines journalism and technology training, and will become a grassroots, internet radio broadcast.
Open Borders works with new Latino immigrant communities, most of whom have come to the Philadelphia area in recent times. We have incredible strengths to draw upon. We come from cultures where family and community is primary. We are storytellers, and it is our oral tradition, our common stories, that bind our families and communities and affirm our common experience and dreams. Here, in our new home, we need to speak to each other and share our stories, to find our common identity and work together to speak to the larger society, to become visible.
However, we share many of the experiences of our Anglo and African-American neighbors in city: like them, many are mostly poor, hold low-wage jobs, and lack education and adequate housing. However, our experience as immigrants adds both an extra layer of vulnerability and potential. The isolation and invisibility of immigration challenges our emotional and physical health, but we also carry strengths from our home cultures that nurture us in our new lives in the United States.Many of us have come north alone, leaving our families and social networks back home. Here, we encounter barriers due to language, prejudice, economic and civil disenfranchisement. We are separated from those we love and often feel unwelcome in our new home, where some call us aliens and even illegals. Often we feel isolated from each other and invisible to the larger world that does not know who we are, that does not know our stories.
If we are reunited here, new conflicts often arise within our families. Gender roles change because it is easier for women to find work. Our children want to be American, and they no longer feel bound to the values of their parents; yet they often feel like foreigners in their new schools.
