BRIDGE: Building a Race and Immigration Dialogue in the Global Economy
A Popular Education Resource for Immigrant and Refugee Community Organizers

**Winner of the 2004 Gustavus Myer Outstanding Book Award!**

Introduction

BRIDGE: Building a Race and Immigration Dialogue in the Global Economy is a tool for all organizers, community groups, educators, activists, advocates, and leaders—anyone committed to supporting the rights of immigrants, refugees, and the communities where we all live.

Who and what does this “bridge” connect? This workbook contains tools for immigrant communities to build alliances and find common ground for action with others fighting for economic, social, and racial justice, and to envision alternatives and resistance in these times of global exclusion, racism, and human rights abuses. BRIDGE strives to place the current work of the immigrant and refugee rights movement in larger historic and global contexts, and to promote the human rights of all migrants and refugees.

The BRIDGE Project workbook is a “toolbox” of training materials, tips, and resources based on a popular education framework. We see this collection as part of a wider strategy of investigating power and relationships—including power dynamics of teaching and education—in the learning experience. We believe that a popular education curriculum is not merely a pile of issues, techniques and information to be repeated in a classroom, but that it is part of an organizational commitment to a process of dialogue, learning, and building community.

BRIDGE is also a set of tools to more closely examine the dynamics of privilege and oppression, inclusion and exclusion in our own lives and work, including racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of intolerance within our own communities. These discussions can only help us to more closely investigate power, and to develop better tactics, strategies and organizing models for change.

How Did We Get Here?
The BRIDGE Project is a political education project of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights to build and sustain alliances between immigrant and non-immigrant communities and institutions. NNIRR first launched the BRIDGE Project in 1998 to bring together diverse communities and institutions in local areas to explore how immigrant communities related to critical issues of racism and race relations, globalization, human rights, and other key topics. The events of September 11, 2001 and the resulting attacks against immigrant and refugee rights in the U.S. and around the world, further underscored the importance of developing educational tools. These dynamics shaped this resulting workbook in many ways.

The BRIDGE workbook is the result of a shared process of many discussions, dialogues, meetings, requests for materials, and test-runs with community groups around the U.S. from 2002-2004. While many of the materials in this book were developed within a U.S.-based immigrant and refugee rights context, we hope that they can be useful to others in a wider, global context.

We hope that BRIDGE provides practical and realistic tools for communities to engage around difficult issues and to build allies. We hope that it helps to build spaces for different communities to dialogue, share experiences, and learn from each other. As with any set of tools, some will be more useful than others, depending on local situations. We hope that these tools can also help to strengthen initiatives and commitments to building processes of dialogue, shared education, and political agreements for common action. We hope that the ideas and information in BRIDGE can be adapted to support the local realties of political and educational work in different communities.

These modules in no way present a comprehensive look at topics that relate to the broad topics of immigration, race, globalization, and the complexities of building sustainable communities and movements for social justice. There are many topics that we did not cover and perspectives that we could not adequately include in this workbook. However, we hope that this workbook can serve as a useful resource to begin these discussions, and to stimulate more discussions on these critical issues.

A few words on translation: this workbook is written in English, which will not meet the needs of communities in our multilingual immigrant rights movement. As we developed this workbook, we continually grappled with this question—how could we best use our limited resources to develop this tool? Our decision was ultimately to finish a complete version of this workbook in English as quickly as possible, and to find resources to support the critical work of translation after its completion. We will, at minimum, place translations of BRIDGE in multiple languages as we complete the translation. We ask for your support as well—if you are interested in supporting translation work with a donation, or if you develop high quality translations from BRIDGE in the course of your work that you would be willing to share with other organizers, please let us know.

The letter “D” in BRIDGE stands for dialogue—which we want to continue with you as you use this workbook. Please keep in touch with us—we are excited to hear how you have been able to use, adapt, and build on the materials in this workbook. NNIRR is also available to help host training sessions, develop other curriculum materials, and to support you as you build more “bridges.”