WORD TRAVELS: Bringing Refugee and Immigrant Voices to the Community

In short, the mission of the project has been to use poetry as a means of storytelling to provide safe space for refugee and immigrant youth to tell the deeply personal and often harrowing stories that honor the individual and cultural identities and to bring these voices through arts modalities to as wide a community audience as possible in order to increase widespread understandings of the refugee and immigrant experience toward creating communities of inclusion, welcome and belonging. Because we are becoming more intergenerational and moving from our ten years in the Multilingual Learners' class room further into the community with more outreach to intergenerational populations we are changing our name from Stories of Arrival: Refugee and Immigrant Youth Voices Poetry Project to WORD TRAVELS: Bringing Refugee and Immigrant Voices to the Community. While our mission of bringing refugee and immigrant stories and voices through poetry and visual art to wide community visibility remains the same we are extending our outreach with new partnerships, with some new approaches and tools for continuing this work beyond our focus on youth voices to ALL voices.