At the end of each programming year, Nashville After Zone Alliance (NAZA) holds the Amazing Race and Showcase to bring all the students together who have participated in the NAZA after school programs across Nashville. RISE has 4 sites that participated in this year’s Showcase. They all took part in the Field Day activities at Glencliff High School and showed off their art from their enhancement activities throughout the year. One site, Stonebrook, did a performance - they sang a song that they wrote with the help of an artist from the YMCA’s artEMBRACE. Another site, Haywood, won the Banner contest (see below). Mayor Karl Dean welcomed the students and handed out awards, including to two of our site coordinators, who completed the training module for Nashville’s Youth Coalition.

Thanks to all our site coordinators and volunteers for helping to make this such a great day for our students, and to all the staff of NAZA for planning such a wonderful event!

#NAZA #artEMBRACE #RISE

Come and see us at the Center for Refugees and Immigrants of Tennessee if you are a refugee who has been residing more than eight months and fewer than five years in the United States of America. We have services to help refugee families, providing caseworkers and employment specialists for up to five years. We work under a federally funded program that is currently serving thousands of refugees from around the world. Some of the specific services under the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) that we offer are Social Adjustment and Employment services, as well as health screenings, referrals, and financial literacy classes.

In order to fully cope with the challenging environment that refugees encounter, social adjustment services help them when they come into the country. We have a highly dedicated staff, daily providing free services such as filling out applications for Food Stamps, Social Security, Social Security Disability Income, Unemployment, Weekly Certification, Family First, Low Income Housing, Section Eight and more.

Employment services are the most sought after services that we offer to our refugee clients. We have great connections to local businesses that help us to link our clients to various employers in and outside Nashville. Our relationship with employers around Nashville has abundantly helped our clients to build up their careers and work ethic. We put our clients in a place where they can establish a good working environment and come up with awards and good recommendations.

We also offer health screenings and financial literacy classes in different sites. Refugee health screenings are in partnership with local health providers and hospitals that cooperate with us and are willing to provide free health screening. We mainly offer financial literacy classes in three different apartment complexes where a large number of our clients reside. Financial literacy classes help refugees in managing money, using banks and allow them to ask any financial questions regarding mortgage, buying a house, starting up new business, etc.

 So, come and see us at the Center for Refugees and Immigrants of Tennessee where we provide beneficial and helpful services to refugees from different countries. We are very thankful to Office of Refugees Resettlement and Tennessee Office for Refugees for providing funds to help refugees in Nashville.  You can give us a call at 615-366-6868 or email me at [email protected]  for any questions or help.

Can you picture freshly made pasta drying on a coat hanger? Hanging from a ceiling light fixture?  Well, at the RISE Millwood site we needed to hang the pasta out to dry somewhere, and a student’s clever idea was right on the money.   On March 10th, our students spent the enhancement hour  learning to combine fresh ingredients like tomatoes, onions, and garlic with lentils, rice, and macaroni to make a traditional  Egyptian dish called Koshari; we also learned how to make our own pasta from scratch and discussed what makes a food “raw,” how to eat healthy whole foods, and how to write out a recipe.  Our students were even tasked with consulting their families’ recipes to check the authenticity of our RISE Koshari.