Conveners
“The core of what we do is in bringing people together to solve problems that are complex, that nobody can solve on their own.”
– Kate Vickery, Former Director, HILSC
what are Conveners?
To effectively allocate resources, build community power, and coordinate efforts to support immigrants, “convener” organizations play the vital role of bringing grassroots organizations, legal and social service providers, and funders together. They break down silos and offer a space for creative, collaborative work to increase access to knowledge and services.
Convenings can be a place for individuals to access information and referrals on essential services and benefits, as well as a space for impacted communities to share challenges within the current immigration ecosystem and offer community-led solutions to address those problems. At their best, convener organizations provide an opportunity for professional immigration service providers to engage with immigrants and their families outside of the client-provider relationship. Leveling this power dynamic helps communities hold service providers accountable and provides a platform to lead strategies to address injustice within the immigration system.
Convener organizations also facilitate community education, creating networks and coalitions for mutual information-sharing, guidance on programming, and litigation support. Some convener organizations provide resources for their member organizations on how to develop community paralegal programs or apply to grants. Being in convening spaces helps organizations work together, tackling injustice from different areas of expertise. These convening spaces can signal partnership opportunities for campaigns and litigation, allowing organizations to delegate tasks, transform campaigns into national movements, or file amicus briefs.
Convenings also allow organizations to operate outside of their silos, and tackle problems they cannot address alone. Through working groups and member-led committees, convener organizations identify gaps and opportunities within the immigration field, and develop collaborative solutions that increase efficiency, inclusion, and impact. Convenings can also provide an opportunity for impacted communities to flag areas in need of financial support.
conveners in action
black alliance for
just immigration (baji)
BAJI’s Black Migrant Ecosystem (BME) hosts convenings in different U.S. cities to bring together Black people in the United States who are interested in immigrant rights work and advocates who support BAJI’s mission. Convenings for 2024 will be hosted in Houston, Miami, New York City, and other cities. It is at these convenings that BAJI funnels more momentum into its campaigns like #BlacknessIs, #ProtectBlackMigrants, and #HousingForAll.
Esperanza Immigrant
Rights Project
Esperanza convenes a number of Los Angeles organizations into an Unaccompanied Minors Collaborative. The Collaborative includes legal service organizations, mental health providers, anti-violence projects, cultural organizations, and other stakeholders that support unaccompanied minors. The convenings provide space for organizations to develop skills, such as recent trainings on working with survivors of trauma and the lens of linguistic diversity. The Collaborative also educates the community about the immigration system and provides knowledge that will combat fear within immigrant communities.
Houston Immigration Legal Services Collaborative (HILSC)
HILSC creates Working Groups that bring together legal and social service providers, grassroots organizations, and funders within the Houston metropolitan area to focus on issues impacting immigrant communities. These include Access to Services, Asylum, Crime Victims, Detention, and Community Outreach/Know Your Rights. The Working Groups function as think-tanks and facilitate trust-building and collaboration among their stakeholders. The Working Group members develop and often launch projects that holistically respond to community needs. They disrupt traditional service providers that are modeled on an attorney-client relationship focused on the individual and specific legal claims, rather than on supporting broader communities to build knowledge and to better promote their varied interests. For example, the Pro Se Asylum Assistance Project seeks to improve access to legal services for asylum-seeking Central American families in removal proceedings. Deportation Defense Houston brings together a cohort of four partner organizations to provide detained representation, and the Immigrant Rights Hotline serves as a gateway to essential information and referral services.
Read More
Funding is another obstacle that might restrict the types of communities and issues traditional providers can serve. But convenings are spaces to make human connections and develop transformative collaborations. HILSC convenes a Grants Committee, a participatory grant-making initiative for members to draft a call for proposals on specific gaps in services, evaluate grant applications, and select organizations to receive the grants. With its most recent grantees, HILSC plans to organize a collaborative evaluation process to create community learning and sharing of best practices.
HILSC works with public and non-profit social service providers about how to break down barriers for immigrants without legal status. After Hurricane Harvey, for example, HILSC began working with more than 40 agencies to develop its Humanitarian Action Plan, a disaster preparedness plan that focused on equitable recovery for immigrants, regardless of legal status.
Immigration advocates
network (IAN)
The Immigration Advocates Network (IAN) convenes webinars that bring together lawyers, advocates, and community members from all over the country. Because of increasing hostility towards immigrants, many immigration organizations have been forced to operate in emergency-response mode, which limits their ability to sustain big picture strategies and collaboration across issues and isolated communities. But IAN’s webinars foster sustained conversations. The webinar topics have included Field Protection Models: Community Navigators, Organizers, and Attorneys Working Together; Getting Your Clients Released on Bond, Utilizing Family and Community Support; Advocating for Local Policies to Protect Immigrants; and Partnerships for Outreach. IAN also partners with Justice Power to share the work of organizations developing legal empowerment strategies. These webinars are a space to discuss best practices, reflect on shared difficulties, ask questions about strategies, and bring the experiences of immigrants into the conversation.
National partnership for
new americans (npna)
NPNA is a national organization with 70 member organizations across 40 states in the United States. It centers driving immigrant inclusion campaigns, programs, and policies on peer-to-peer mentorship and exchanges of ideas between member organizations. NPNA supports its member organizations, that are on the ground organizing and engaging with communities, with training, tools, funding, and staffing. Created by member organizations, NPNA’s work is community-based and holistic, yielding its power from member-guided work. For example, NPNA sends a yearly survey to collect feedback from member organizations for the following year’s focus. And knowing that DACA will likely end in 2025, NPNA is starting to meet and strategize about next steps.
About 32 of the 70 organizations are part of NPNA’s “Legal Service Collective” which meets monthly to strategize, debrief, and brainstorm new strategies regarding legal services and capacity-building. Some organizations do community education and Know Your Rights programming, offer referrals to legal services, and host pro se legal clinics. NPNA hosts trainings for its member organizations on: DACA, citizenship, TPS, crimmigration, and immigration law. At least once or twice a year it supports organizations applying for DOJ accreditation. Some member organizations have community navigators, others have staff who do accompaniment, and others have accredited representatives.
Read More
Further, at the National Immigrant Inclusion Conference which is the largest immigrant rights conference held every 2 years, NPNA usually has about 1,000-1,200 people coming together to address an array of issues regarding immigrants, not just legal services. Respecting the need for diversity and inclusion, NPNA makes an effort to include Black-led immigrant organizations, AAPI-led organizations, LGBTQ+ organizations, etc.
Citizenship has been an NPNA priority since its formation in 2010 because it allows people to vote. Citizenship is not the end goal––the engagement of people is the end goal. NPNA is the convener of Naturalize Now, a campaign that provides tools for naturalization. It provides communications and social media toolkits, boilerplate language, etc., to organizations that take the information and run with it. NPNA runs reports on the number of people who are eligible to naturalize in different states and helps people identify different needs. It hosts monthly meetings for members to attend and share and replicate what’s working in their states; and it is trying to get members from non-traditional states.
Organized Communities Against Deportations (ocad)
OCAD engages in cross-movement building, collaborating with Black-led organizations, as well as those advocating for tenants, workers, queer communities, and women. They strategically highlight the immigration system’s unequal and oppressive effects on the everyday lives of undocumented immigrants and the specific experiences of those at the intersection of isolated identities. Through these convenings, OCAD seeks to create change that goes beyond band-aid solutions and addresses the interrelated and deep-rooted systemic problems.
OCAD is part of a coalition of organizations working to eliminate the Chicago Gang Database. Campaigning efforts revealed that the gang database was a tool of criminalization for brown and Black communities. OCAD also leads the Chicago Working Group that seeks to eliminate city carve outs or exceptions within the sanctuary policy. With their partner, the Autonomous Tenants Union, OCAD is also part of the Albany Park Defense Network which connects deportation and evictions as a form of displacement
unidosus
Every year, UnidosUS convenes its affiliates on three occasions. In the spring, UnidosUS has an annual event in Washington, D.C. that is focused on policy and advocacy work. The event includes a training related to Latine advocacy and the critical issues facing the community. Affiliates might learn about common challenges, explore how their work is tied to different policy debates, and engage in knowledge and resource exchanges. Every summer, UnidosUS hosts its annual conference; one of the largest gatherings of Latines and allies committed to increasing opportunity and driving social justice for the Latine community. The 2023 annual conference highlighted work in Chicago, shedding light on organizations that have accredited representatives, paving an opportunity to platform the existence and validation of accredited representatives and community navigators. Then in the fall convening, UnidosUS brings affiliates together for trainings to strengthen their internal capacities.
UnidosUS is one of the co-chairs of the coalition Ready to Stay and is a national partner in the New Americans Campaign by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.
