From crisis to cornerstone: How welcoming is creating stability and belonging for this community foundation

Local institutions, like community foundations, can stopgap migration crises by leveraging their local knowledge, resources, and leadership. In this guest post, Valerie Carlin, the chief impact officer at Aspen Community Foundation, highlights how community foundations can go beyond short-term crisis response to build a lasting foundation for belonging and welcoming.

In our rural community in the Colorado Rockies, the summer and fall months are a busy time for construction, landscaping, and other businesses that rely on seasonal day laborers to fill the ranks.

We’ve been accustomed to people migrating in and out of the region for work and always assumed they had places to live, people to help them feel like part of the community, knowledge of how to navigate the systems.

However, this group of asylum seekers from Venezuela had no such safety net. Drawn to Aspen and neighboring regions with the promise of work and lulled by the warm weather, they quickly settled in an area campground, living in tents and cars.

Fast forward to October. The first snow has fallen, and nights are getting colder and colder. A group of local Latino advocates visited the encampment and learned that there were immediate health and safety concerns for the 80-plus people living there. The campground was closing. Law enforcement had begun to crack down on them. Their lack of connection to the greater community became an obstacle.

Who could help them understand how to navigate our systems? Who could help the systems understand their needs?

Beyond the local Latino advocacy organization that stepped in to conduct a census, assess the newcomers’ needs, and connect them to resources that could help with their immediate needs, it became clear that our region did not have an entity that could take on the coordination of resources for the long term.

The municipal government took action, sought county, state, and federal funding, and hired a coordinator to guide the response efforts. Aspen Community Foundation was tapped to manage charitable contributions to the town’s efforts and direct the funds to fill gaps and provide necessary resources to support relief efforts. A humanitarian crisis was narrowly avoided.

"As community foundations, it is our duty to embrace the entire community, regardless of length of residence, country of origin, or circumstance of arrival."

The experience underscored the importance of collective action and community resilience. It was great timing that the opportunity to join the CF Leads and Welcoming America community of practice came to our attention.

Aspen Community Foundation is comfortable in its traditional funder role. However, we were interested to learn how other communities were responding to the influx of new arrivals and what roles community foundations were playing in response efforts.

While our immediate interest was in crisis response, we were also interested in engaging with other foundations that are doing welcoming and belonging work as part of their mission-driven or programmatic work. We wanted to learn what this looked like beyond crisis and how to incorporate welcoming and belonging into our work - and community - for the long term.

Through the community of practice, I met so many foundation peers addressing the same questions and challenges as Aspen Community Foundation. I enjoyed sharing stories with the foundations who are, like us, pushing to build community capacity for welcoming and supporting newcomers. And I admired those foundations who have moved their communities beyond seeing newcomers as a threat or a burden to recognizing and honoring them as vital to the community’s fabric and future.

As community foundations, it is our duty to embrace the entire community, regardless of length of residence, country of origin, or circumstance of arrival. This means using our relationships, influence, convening, funding, to lead welcoming and settlement efforts to ensure that everyone has equal opportunity to thrive and belong.

To learn more about incorporating immigrant inclusion into community foundations, explore Advancing Welcoming through Community Foundations.