March 2021: New project to serve most vulnerable children

BCNH has always tried to serve whole families. Most of our work has been with adults and parents: helping them get better jobs or moving toward citizenship. Their children, once they enter the public school system, tend to assimilate quickly. As we learned during COVID, remote learning created serious challenges for English language learners, but we helped bridge that gap with focused case management work.

But what about the children who aren’t in school because of chronic illness, or who have special needs made even more challenging because of language barriers?

BCNH is about to help parents address those challenges. We have received a one-year $10,000 grant from the Council for Youth with Chronic Conditions to help connect families to the services they. Our case managers will get to know the family and the youths needing services, and they will help the families work with the English-speaking doctors, special ed teachers, advocates, and attorneys who need to create a web of support.

One teacher of English for Speakers of Other Languages described the project this way: you’ll be working with the most vulnerable individuals in the most vulnerable communities.

Given their challenges, we expect that many of the families we want to reach will be invisible to the system today. Please help us find them. If you know of refugee households with children or youths who need special services, please email us at bcnh@bcinnh.org.