How It Works
Recognizing the Stranger employs a three-fold process:
(1) investing in immigrant leadership with advanced Spanish-language training to build their ability to conduct specialized workshops and civic academies in their home parishes,
(2) teaching immigrant leaders how to impact parish, school and community life through alliances with non-immigrants, and
(3) developing the strategic regional capacity to create new relationships of mutual understanding and trust to inform and expand a pro-immigrant constituency.
Recognizing the Stranger starts by investing in the capacity of immigrant families both to claim the agency and dignity of personhood that is their birthright and to build, with their non immigrant neighbors, a constituency to address the concerns of poor and low-income families. The strategy works at the diocesan level with local parishes to identify, train, and mentor immigrant leaders in the skills of public life- skills necessary to build connections among themselves and with allies in their parishes and in the broader community.
Thus far, Recognizing the Stranger has trained over 4,600 leaders from 370 parishes in 20 Catholic dioceses. Participants are demonstrating a heightened sense of parish leadership, a clearer awareness of the mission of the church, and are actively engaging larger groups of fellow parishioners, with the long-term goal of forming greater solidarity between immigrant leaders and native born Catholics.
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