Supporting New New Yorkers

For more than two decades, the Interfaith Center of New York (ICNY) has supported faith leaders and houses of worship who welcome migrants and serve immigrant communities. This support includes civics education, retreats dedicated to issues specific for immigrant communities, and on-the ground advocacy and organizing for and with migrant-serving houses of worship.

Below please find important resources including an extensive document outlining sanctuary guidelines, ICNY’s history serving faith communities and their constituents, ways to join us in equipping diverse houses of worship to support our new New Yorker, and recent press.

Resources | Equipping Houses of Worship | General Sanctuary Guidelines| Press Coverage

Resources to Equip Immigrant Communities

There are countless helpful resources available to New York City Faith Communities who are working to support the newest New Yorkers. Unfortunately, they can be hard to all track down. In order to help get the best resources into the most hands, the Interfaith Center of New York has put together a resource hub to compile materials to support immigrants. Click the button below to dive in:

Resources to Equip Immigrant Communities

General Sanctuary Guidelines

Newly Arrived Bus Passengers Disembark, New York City, August 2023

Equipping Diverse Houses of Worship

With the help of Trinity Grants, ICNY created the “Equipping Houses of Worship to Support Migrants” program in response to the rapid increase in migrants and asylum seekers arriving in New York City beginning the summer of 2022 to catalyze diverse houses of worship to provide support and shelter for asylum seekers. With this goal, ICNY 1) distributed small grants to diverse faith communities and 2) created a learning community that convenes virtually on a bimonthly basis to offer a shared scriptural reflection, receive and give technical assistance and problem solve, and develop advocacy strategies. In addition to addressing the immediate needs of migrants, this work builds the capacity of diverse houses of worship allowing them to take part in wider city-run bed stabilization proposed initiatives for the future.

Our work has helped fill in the gaps in the large-scale response to the asylum seeker crisis with the grassroots power of faith leaders and communities. As one member of the network described it, the work of this grant is crucial because no single response can be comprehensive.

About ICNY’s Work with New New Yorkers

ICNY also works tirelessly to leverage our convening power to strengthen the faith sector’s response to crises faced by their communities. For example, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement were actively deporting immigrants from neighborhoods across NYC during the Trump Administration, ICNY recruited congregations to offer physical sanctuary for families under threat of deportation and accompaniment to and from their immigration appointments.

More recently, when buses from Texas began arriving in 2022, ICNY formed a coalition of over 100 congregations and faith-based organizations to help collectively meet the needs of those arriving. Through that coalition in the years since, ICNY has organized the faith sector’s response to migrant arrivals and provided technical assistance to strengthen the services they provide. ICNY’s indirect impact through this program – which has regranted $140,000 to date – has impacted 86,000 new New Yorkers, and the stories from these impacted individuals and service providers have helped to fuel our advocacy work in both NYC and Washington DC.

Central to ICNY’s past coalition-building work has been a re-granting process aimed at reducing the fiscal burden on congregations. By coordinating and re-granting funds to faith-based programs assisting asylum seekers, ICNY has been able to positively grow the capacity of a dozen grassroots faith-based programs that are putting new New Yorkers on a path to resettlement.

Now, thanks to the support of Robin Hood, the New York Community Trust, and their Fund for the Newest New Yorkers, ICNY will create a new consortium of five congregation-based programs with whom we will serve 2,000 asylum seekers with a suite of services ranging from physical accompaniment to food access, donations, pro-se legal assistance, and referrals. If you would like to learn more about the consortium and its members, please email Brennan Brink at brennan@interfaithcenter.org. To make a gift in support of this and our other Migrant Shelter and Support Initiatives, click here.

The generous funding from New York Community Trust also builds on the direct service work ICNY undertakes to support new New Yorkers. For the past two years, ICNY has provided warm, delicious, culturally competent meals in mosques serving new New Yorkers during the holy month of Ramadan. Ahead of the previous school year, ICNY ensured that every single student living in the City’s Humanitarian Emergency Response & Relief Centers received a backpack with school supplies. Now, ICNY has launched it’s newest direct service initiative: Case Management to vulnerable New Yorkers.