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Immigrant and Refugee Rights Training Institute
September 24-26, 2004 Oakland, CA
WORKSHOP DESCRIPTIONS
Facilitator Biographies

Workshop Session I

Workshop I-A: Human Rights are Migrant Rights
Immigrant and refugee communities living in the U.S. experience human rights abuses every day. The human rights framework can be a powerful tool for organizing in many ways. Participants will explore the connections between the rights of immigrants and refugees to human rights, reflect on the role of human rights in our lives, learn about human rights mechanisms relevant to immigrant and refugee communities and examine ways that communities have organized around human rights abuses.
Facilitators: Eunice Cho and Victor Narro

Workshop I-B: Globalization, Migration, and Workers Rights
Corporations hail globalization for the increased glow of technology, communication, and trade. But globalization has devastated workers and the poor, and immigration policies designed to stop migration have resulted in increased abuse and discrimination against migrants. Participants will discuss globalization's impact on migration, identify policies and institutions that affect corporate globalization, and examine how globalization affects our communities and how communities are responding. Participants will also view Uprooted: Refugees of the Global Economy.
Facilitators: Pancho Arguelles and Tomas Aguilar

Workshop I-C: History of Immigration 101 and 102
The history of the United States is a history of migration. Except for Native Americans, everyone in the United States is either an immigrant or the descendent of immigrants and forced migrants. This module gives a background to the history of immigration to the United States, and highlights some of the key issues that intersect with immigration patterns, such as labor, race relations, and other social movements. Features the Immigration History Timeline in pictures—and additional activities that can be done with the timeline.
Facilitators: Stacy Kono and Trishala Deb

Workshop I-D: Media Spokesperson Training—SPIN Project
With effective media strategies, communities can pressure targets and build on your base of support. The SPIN Project provides assistance to grassroots groups to build their capacity to engage – and become leaders in – the media debate from the grassroots level. This workshop will help you develop your media spokesperson skills, help frame issues for effective media campaigns, particularly for immigrant and refugee communities. Framing discussion will focus primarily on election 2004.
Facilitator: Diana Ip, SPIN Project

Workshop Session II:

Workshop II-A: Building Immigrant Women's Leadership
Women play a central role in organizing efforts for immigrant and refugee communities. Their contributions, however, often go unrecognized, and our own organizations can replicate sexism, racism, and other forms of oppression. This workshop will offer tools to create a process where groups can discuss ways to better support the work of immigrant women in our movement.
Facilitators: Alma Maquitico, Pancho Arguelles

Workshop II-B: Introduction to Race, Migration, and Multiple Oppressions
In this workshop, participants will explore how different parts of our identities—including race, immigration status, gender, sexual orientation, class, religion, and others—lead us to experience privilege and oppression in different ways. Participants examine negative stereotypes and their relationship to unjust policies and structures that create oppression.
Facilitators: Miriam Ching Louie, Victor Narro

Workshop II-C: Immigrant Rights and LGBT Rights
Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered immigrants living in the U.S. face many levels of discrimination, including xenophobia, racism, homophobia, and sexism. Participants will explore the connections between immigrant rights and LGBT rights, explore how homophobic messages about gender and sexual orientation are shaped very early on, and how immigration policies affect LGBT immigrants.
Facilitators: Trishala Deb, Eunice Cho

Workshop II-D: Self-Care for Organizers: Avoiding Burn-Out In Our Work
As people working for social justice, immigrant rights, and community empowerment, we often find ourselves working past our limits as we juggle our work, organizing, and family responsibilities. It's no wonder that we find ourselves feeling overwhelmed, burnt out, and constantly tired! This workshop will discuss ways in which we can take better care of ourselves, make decisions about our life priorities, as well as ways that community groups and organizations have developed ways to support and take care of everyone in our communities--including the people who work for positive change--you!
Facilitator: Amy Casso

Workshop III-A: Building Common Ground Between Communities—The Changing Demographics of Race and Migration
Immigration is one component of a demographic shift taking place in the U.S. Demographic change in many communities can result in conflict between new immigrants and more established groups. Many immigrants share common interests and issues with other groups, and alliances can help to solve common issues. This workshop will place these demographic changes within a larger context and participants will identify and examine areas of tension within communities, and discuss possible solutions.
Facilitators: Miriam Ching Louie and Stacy Kono

Workshop III-B: Monitoring and Documenting Human Rights Abuses: Tools for Building Immigrant Community Power
Documentation of human rights abuses against is an important way to empower the capacity of immigrant communities, to respond to abusive law enforcement practices, identify patterns of abuse in their communities and gather information in order to change public policy. Participants will discuss ways to organize community members to document human rights abuses. Participants will also discuss how the results of monitoring and documentation work in the community can be used as a way to build power for immigrant communities.
Facilitators: Maria Jimenez and Alma Maquitico

Workshop III-C: Raising Money for Community Change: Grassroots Fundraising
This workshop will cover the basics of grassroots fundraising through presentation, discussion, and interactive learning experience. The workshop will be divided into several parts: the politics of money; where the money comes from in the U.S.; principles of grassroots fundraising; overview of successful fundraising methods; and a hands-on practice session where the participants will design a fundraising event for their organization.
Facilitator: Helen S. Kim

Workshop III-D: Power Tools for Sharing Power--Interpretation and Translation in Organizing Immigrant Communities
Translation and Interpretation are powerful language tools that can be used to achieve different political goals. They can be used to marginalize the power and voice of immigrant communities to maintain privilege and oppression; or they can be used to create spaces for new community voices in ways that transform race relationships and empower marginalized groups. Participants will explore different approaches to translation and interpretation; best practices for using interpretation and translation in immigrant community organizing and leadership development; and discuss the political importance of this work. Open to speakers of all languages.
Facilitator: Alice Johnson

Facilitator Biographies

Tomas Aguilar is a Community Organizer with Alternatives for Community and Environment (ACE) in Roxbury MA.  He is working on several projects with ACE including working with Safety Net, an organization of residents
in the community and on ACE's Services to Allies project helping coordinate the Northeast Environmental Justice Network.  He also works with a collective in Texas with the Spanish-speaking immigrant community
using popular education. Before ACE, he worked for three years at an economic justice organization in Boston. He is originally from Laredo, Texas.

Francisco Arguelles Paz y Puente , born in Mexico, has lived in the U.S. since 1997. He is a co-author of BRIDGE: Building a Race and Immigration Dialogue in the Global Economy. From 2000-2003, he served as the organizer for the Immigrant Community Organizer Working Group (ICO) of the National Organizers's Alliance, and is currently a board member of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. He began his work as a popular educator in 1983 with Guatemalan refugees in Chiapas. He has organized and taught popular education extensively in throughout Mexico, Nicaragua, and the U.S. for the past 20 years.

Amy Casso is a Field Organizer for the National Organizers Alliance. She is a long time advocate for immigrant rights. Her work has ranged from community organizing, policy analysis and advocacy, to immigrant rights trainings.  She is dedicated to the development of building the capacity of the immigrant rights movement and creating critical thinkers for the long haul.

Eunice Hyunhye Cho is the BRIDGE Project Coordinator at the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, and is the editor and co-author of BRIDGE: Building a Race and Immigration Dialogue in the Global Economy. She also co-coordinated NNIRR's campaign to bring grassroots immigrant and refugee leaders to the UN World Conference Against Racism, and co-authored and edited several reports about the World Conference. She is a Steering Committee member of the Committee on Women, Population, and the Environment. A Korean American hailing from Arizona, she drums and chants with Jamaesori: Sister Sound, a drumming group of Korean American women community activists.

Trishala Deb has worked as a service provider and community organizer in North Carolina, Georgia and New York. Her work has focused on welfare rights, domestic violence, immigrant/women's/lgbt rights, and building progressive spaces within the South Asian community. She is currently working for The Audre Lorde Project, is a member of the South Asian Lesbian Gay Association (SALGA), and a member of the community funding board for the North Star Fund.

Patty Hirota-Cohen will be leading the yoga class for IRRTI participants. Patty has been practicing yoga for over 14 years, and completed the 18-month, 680 hour teacher training program at Piedmont Yoga Studio (PYS) in June 2001 studying with Rodney Yee, Richard Rosen, Mary Paffard, and Patricia Sullivan. With an Iyengar alignment-based foundation, she focuses on working from the inner body, using an intuitive approach. She believes yoga is a personal journey and encourages exploration through use of imagery, poetry and breath. Patty is also on the board of Asian Immigrant Women Advocates and has been an ESL teacher for adults for 8 years.

Maria Jimenez is a veteran organizer in the immigrant rights movement with over sixteen years of experience in monitoring and documenting human rights abuses in immigrant communities. She is currently a Board Member of the Union Community Fund of the AFL-CIO, and works with several immigrant rights groups in the Houston, TX region to establish human rights training programs. She is the former director of the Immigration Law Enforcement Monitoring Project (ILEMP), and is a board member of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

Stacy Kono Stacy Kono is the Intergenerational Program Coordinator at Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA) in Oakland, California. AIWA is a community based organization that works for the power and leadership of low-income Asian immigrant women and their families, especially immigrant youth. For the past eight years, Stacy has coordinated organizing campaigns like the Garment Workers Justice Campaign and the youth program, which is called the Youth Build Immigrant Power Project. Currently, the two campaigns Stacy is working on at AIWA are about occupational health and safety in the garment industry, and language access in the public school systems.

Miriam Ching Yoon Louie's books include BRIDGE: Building a Race and Immigration Dialogue in the Global Economy; Sweatshop Warriors: Immigrant Women Workers Take on the Global Factory (South End Press, 2001); and Women's Education in the Global Economy. She is an advisory board member of the Women of Color Resource Center, and formerly served as a national campaign media coordinator of Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (Oakland, CA) and Fuerza Unida in San Antonio, TX. Of Korean and Chinese descent, Miriam clangs lion cymbals in XicKorea: Poems, Rants, and Words Together and jams with Jamaesori/Sister Sound, a drumming group of Korean American women community activists.

Diana Ip is a Media Trainer & Strategist for the SPIN Project. Aware of the challenges that face organizations working to frame and reframe social issues, Diana Ip joined SPIN in April 2003 eager to bring to progressive organizations communications and media relations strategies to promote social justice and change. Previously, she served as an associate at i.e. communications, LLC, where she helped devise and implement communications efforts for foundations and non-profit organizations throughout California.

Alice Johnson coordinates Highlander's Multilingual Capacity Building, organizing the simultaneous interpretation in workshops and the written translation of Highlander materials, and helping develop Highlander's political analysis around multilingual movement building. Alice came to Highlander from El Centro Hispano in Durham, NC, where she worked as the Translation Coordinator. She was born and raised in New Bern, North Carolina.

Alma Maquitico has many years of experience organizing migrant workers around human rights on the US Mexico Border, and facilitating trainings on globalization and the economy for immigrant women workers. She is currently on the board of the Sin Fronteras Farmworkers Project and is the United States Coordinator for the Network Tejiendo Alternativas Sin Fronteras, which focuses networking organizations in the U.S. and Mexico around issues of migration, human rights, militarization, and labor rights. She is the former Assistant Director of the Border Network for Human Rights in El Paso, TX. Alma migrated from Mexico to the U.S. in 1997. Her work in popular education, theater, puppetry and cultural work plays a key role in her approach to community organizing.

Victor Narro is currently the project Director of the UCLA Downtown Labor Center, where his main focus is to provide leadership training and workshops for immigrant workers from unions and worker centers throughout Los Angles. Victor was formerly the Co-Executive Director of Sweatshop Watch, where he focused on eliminating sweatshop conditions and improving the lives of garment workers through policy, advocacy, and campaign organizing efforts. Prior to coming to Sweatshop Watch, Victor was the Workers' Rights Project Director for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA).