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The Arab-American Family Support Center, Inc.'s New Immigrants and Refugees Fund provides help for families in need. For a limited time, an anonymous donor is doubling your contribution to our cause! Learn more about our organization and the Fund below.
The Arab-American Family Support Center, Inc. (AAFSC) is a 501(c)3 nonprofit, non-sectarian trauma-informed settlement house serving multigenerational immigrant families for almost twenty-five years. Rooted in the heart of Brooklyn, AAFSC offers holistic wrap-around services for New Americans and refugees at seven locations throughout New York City, and an additional site at Khalil Gibran International Academy (KGIA). Our mission is to empower new immigrants with the tools they need to successfully acclimate to the world around them and become active participants in their communities.
Our New Immigrants and Refugees Fund fills a critical gap by offsetting major expenses for newly-arrived immigrants and refugees that no organization or entity is able to provide assistance towards. An average refugee family has an International Organization for Migration (IOM) bill of $5,000 that they must pay back to cover their airfare to the United States. Without support from the Fund, families are often left struggling to meet their basic needs in the face of this major expense.
Many recently-arrived refugees and immigrants, especially children, who qualify for the New Immigrants and Refugees Fund, have experienced events related to war or persecution that may affect their mental and physical health long after those events have occurred. In their countries of origin, the majority of newcomers have experienced and witnessed violence, suffered from a lack of food, water, or shelter, experienced physical injuries, infections, and diseases, torture and forced labor, sexual assault, a lack of medical care, and the loss of loved ones, properties and life savings. According to the Department of State Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, from October 2016-April 2017, 361 Syrian refugees were resettled in NY, 153 in New Jersey, and 117 in Connecticut.
With AAFSC’s New Immigrants and Refugees Fund, a committee of volunteers will review qualifying cases and expenses to administer aid from the Fund to families in need. The committee includes Naseem Haffar, Founding and Managing Partner of Minara Investments, Liz Jebara, a Syrian-American property manager and longtime AAFSC volunteer, Claudia Schiepers, Chief Marketing Officer at Greystone, and Tanzie C. B. Turel, Director for Executive Office Operations at Greystone.
To learn more about the needs of our families, we invite you to view a short film about a family of Syrian refugees who could benefit from the Fund at http://bit.ly/2qRcAUk and visit our website at www.aafscny.org.
