RaceWire Article - December 2004
Strengthening Arab American Families: The First Network of Arab American Service Providers
By Karen Rignall
Last spring, Nahla Kayali and her mother had a simple question for a supermarket manager after noting that they hadn’t received a coupon discount. “Could you reimburse us for the coupon amount?” The response was hostility: “You don’t belong here. Why don’t you go back to your country?” It is a common refrain that many Arab Americans have heard in the years since September 11.
“ I thought it was particularly ironic that I should experience this kind of bigotry—someone telling me to go home—because this is my country,” Kayali says. “For years, I have dedicated myself to this country, my adopted home of over thirty years, by helping Arabs and Muslims integrate into American society.” Kayali is the founder and director of ACCESS California Services, the only human service agency in Southern California serving Arab Americans and Muslims with culturally sensitive programs such as parenting classes in Arabic and immigration services.
Kayali’s organization is one of the founding members of a new national group that hopes to address this backlash against Arab Americans. The first network of Arab American grassroots service providers, the National Network for Arab-American Communities (NNAAC), announced its formation at a press conference on Thursday, November 17, 2004 in Dearborn, Michigan.
NNAAC has been working for two years as an informal collaboration of ten Arab-American organizations, which include grassroots service providers from Brooklyn, Orlando, Dearborn, Chicago, Anaheim, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Flint, Houston, and San Francisco.
The goal of NNAAC is to support Arab American grassroots providers in their efforts to build strong families and communities. There are approximately 3.5 million Americans who trace their ancestry to the Arab world. According to the Arab American Institute, a national civil rights organization, about a quarter of these are foreign-born immigrants and 80% of Arab Americans are citizens.
The community came into the spotlight after September 11, 2001, when popular and government backlash targeted Arab Americans. Hate crimes shot up and continue to rise, and over 1,200 Arab and Muslim immigrants were detained without charge. Both immigration and security policies focused attention on the Arab community, creating a strong sense of fear and isolation, particularly among new immigrants. However, many Arab Americans have felt broad discrimination in this country for years and have not traditionally been well served by mainstream government and social programs.
NNAAC programs will work towards developing grassroots institutions that can meet the needs of and represent the concerns of Arab Americans at the local level, and then add a unified voice about these needs on the national level. The priority of the network will be to provide ongoing support for member organizations and to collaborate on joint human service programs.
The network is also important as the first group of its kind to demand equal rights for Arab Americans and equal access to a broad array of social programs as well as civil rights and civil liberties. “Arab Americans are part of the social fabric of this country and need to be heard,” said Hatem Abudayyeh, Executive Director of the Arab American Action Network in Chicago, an NNAAC member organization.
In its early stages, NNAAC will be housed at ACCESS, the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services, in Dearborn, Michigan. Dearborn and Southeast Michigan have the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the country—approximately 300,000 people. ACCESS has served the region with social services and advocacy for over thirty-three years and is now the largest Arab American human services and advocacy agency in the country.
NNAAC is similar to the Urban League or the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), which are the national community and service organizations for African Americans and Latinos respectively. As NCLR President Raul Yzaguirre noted in a statement, “The birth of the National Network for Arab-American Communities is significant for us at NCLR, which was founded 35 years ago to support a similar network of Latino organizations in the Southwest. Today we are proud to say that NCLR’s network has grown to over 300 community-based organizations throughout the United States…We believe that this kind of work strengthens communities, and we believe that it will strengthen America.”
Immediately after its founding press conference, members of NNAAC convened a two-and-a-half day conference in Dearborn to discuss organizational development, human services programs, community organizing and the continuation of the Arab-American Resource Corps (ARC) initiative, which started as the network’s first program in 2002. ARC is the first-ever federal AmeriCorps community service program to specifically target the needs of the Arab-American community. In 2003 and 2004, 35 ARC AmeriCorps members assisted over 5,000 families and individuals with social services, supported 750 young people with after-school and recreational programs and organized more than 50 cultural events.
NNAAC plans to support its members through training programs to strengthen their organizations’ management and finances. By creating a forum for mutual support, the network also plans on creating a unified voice at the national level to bring attention to the need for equal access to government programs and services, the importance of civic participation among Arab Americans, and the ways that immigration policy and limits on civil liberties have affected Arab American communities around the country. “By coming together to form this network, we’re determined help Arab Americans have equal rights and live the American dream. This is the way we will create lasting community change and fight the discrimination our community continues to experience,” said Ismael Ahmed, Executive Director of ACCESS.
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[Portions of this article previously appeared in The Forum and Link: A Contemporary Journal Celebrating Arab America]
Karen Rignall is the National Outreach Director for ACCESS in Dearborn,
MI. She joined ACCESS in 2002 after working in the Middle East and
North Africa on economic development issues.
© 2006 Applied Research Center
Word count: 907
© 2006 Applied Research Center
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