St. Paul Nonprofit Offering “Know Your Rights” Workshops for Immigrants

Since its inception in 2019, the International Institute’s Community Workshops (CW) program has equipped New Americans with the information, skills, and resources needed to navigate their new lives in Minnesota. To that end, we developed an 11-week curriculum that teaches students about all the different systems and institutions they will likely encounter as they resettle in Minnesota, including: renters rights and responsibilities, employment, the K-12 school system, how to buy a house, how to file your taxes, how to pick a health insurance plan, and how to manage your finances, among others. We’ve even led field trips to important civic institutions such as libraries, county offices, outdoor recreation sites, and even professional sports facilities!

A part of the Minnesota Resettlement Network and Adult Education, workshops focus on high-quality, student-centered instruction that builds knowledge of US systems and institutions – and also provides practical, actionable information that helps students make sense of the different systems they encounter. The simple truth that guides our work is this: that all students should have a clear, undeniable sense of access and ownership of the systems and institutions that they encounter, in Minnesota and in the United States at large. To the end, our classes not only teach how these systems work, but also show our New American students how they can access these systems, resources, and institutions for themselves – and therefore feel the same sense of ownership that any lifelong Minnesotan would have.

Since the current Presidential administration started targeting immigrant communities earlier this year, we’ve seen a huge demand for one workshop in particular: our Know Your Rights (KYR) classes. In response, and in partnership with legal experts at the Resettlement Programs Office (RPO), we created curriculum for a Know Your Rights lesson, which includes:

• An overview of state and federal law enforcement
• People’s rights when encountered by ICE
• How citizens and non-citizens can be prepared for an ICE encounter
• Information about free and lost-cost Immigration Legal Services

While we cannot give legal advice, especially in client-specific scenarios, we can provide this general information and direct people to professional legal services that can assist. The presentation is scaffolded for multi-level ESL classes and can be taught without interpretation to most levels. We also do have funding to provide interpreters (1-2 per class) for those who need it, provided they meet our eligibility criteria. We’ve had the opportunity to offer these presentations here at IIMN, as well as at other Adult Education sites and programs in the Twin Cities. Thank you to those who have partnered with us!

If you or your site would be interested in hosting a KYR workshop, we’d love to chat with you about next steps. Please feel free to reach out to me (Matt) using my contact info below. We look forward to hearing from you!

Matt Bergquist
[email protected]
651-377-8653