The Successful New Americans Project (SNAP): Linking Research, National Level Activities and Resources, and Grassroots Community Development

Presenters: Dr. Max Niedzwiecki; Director of Programs and Resource Development, SEARAC; Silas Cha, SNAP Field Coordinator, Fresno Center for New Americans

Max is the director of Programs and Resource Development at SEARAC, the Southeast Asian Action Resource Center, in Washington, D.C. He holds a Ph.D in Cultural Anthropology from Boston University and a BA in Asian Studies and Clinical Psychology from Tufts University. He has worked with Khmer-American community-based organizations in Massachusetts, and with the International Human rights Law Group’s Cambodian Defenders Project in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Silas Cha is the Hmong-focused Field Coordinator for SEARAC’s Successful New Americans Project (SNAP), and is stationed in the Fresno Center for New Americans. He was born in Laos, and initially resettled with his family in Nashville, TN. He holds a BA in Philosophy from UC Berkeley, and has experience working with non-profit organizations in Fresno—including FCNA, where he most recently served as Project Coordinator for an employment program.

The Successful New Americans Project (SNAP) integrates social scientific research and the resources of national-level organizations with grassroots work at nonprofit organizations. SNAP is a three-year project that began operation in October, 1999 with funding from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement. SNAP’S chief aims are to strengthen Southeast Asian American community-based organizations, research ways in which many SE Asian Americans have achieved their goals, produce a multilingual research report on the findings of the project’s first two years, and bring the report’s findings to a wider audience of nonprofit refugee organizations, governmental agencies, and multicultural non-profit organizations. SNAP is carried out by SEARAC and six collaborating organizations: the Cambodian Association of Greater Philadelphia; the Fresno Center for New Americans; the Newcomers Community Service Center of metropolitan Washington, D.C; the Research Development Institute of Houston, TX; Hmong National Development; and the Southeast Asia Community Resource Center.

SNAP is urgently needed by Southeast Asian American communities and community-based organizations. Although some of these organizations have thrived, many of them are struggling. And while some Southeast Asian Americans have succeeded in by culture-specific and mainstream standards, many others have not. For example, according to the best statistics now available, 43% of Cambodians and 65% of Hmong in this country live in poverty; Vietnamese American women are five times more likely than European American women to suffer form cervical cancer; and over 60% of Hmong Americans live in "linguistically isolated" households.

Successful New Americans Project (SNAP) Press Release
Former Refugees Forge New Paths Towards Success 

Helping former refugees take full advantage of the opportunities available to them as citizens of the United States is the goal of a project awarded funding from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement. This three-year "Successful New Americans Project" (or SNAP) is spearheaded by the  Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (or SEARAC) of Washington, DC – the national capacity-building and advocacy organization managed by and for Americans of Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, and Vietnamese descent. 

SNAP is a collaborative project that will help community-based organizations known as mutual assistance associations (or MAAs) in four  different states to empower their clients economically, professionally, socially, and culturally. "SNAP will help new Americans from  Southeast  Asia to improve their own lives, their families, and their  communities.  It's about giving people the tools they need in order to take charge of their own destinies – not about giving hand-outs," reports SEARAC Executive Director KaYing Yang, who fled from Laos as a young girl in 1976. "One of the most important things about SNAP is that it is locally based and will be managed within the target communities. This will  ensure that the project will be especially responsive to client needs. SNAP is also innovative because it will foster productive working relationships between  national and community-based organizations, and  because it will help some of the nation's most successful new Americans to teach other new immigrants and refugees the secrets of their success," Ms. Yang adds.

Such a program is sorely needed. Many Southeast Asian Americans –who together number nearly two million – have succeeded by their own estimation  and according to mainstream standards, but many others have not. For example, the last Census found that while 10% of all Americans and 14% of all Asian Americans were officially impoverished, 47% of Cambodians, 66% of Hmong, 67% of Laotians,  and 34% of Vietnamese were impoverished. Community members and advocates hope that these and similar phenomena will be shown to have improved by the 2000 Census. However, there is broad agreement that such banes as poverty remain prevalent among Southeast Asian Americans, and that the "model minority" image of Asian Americans glosses over many important social facts.

SEARAC implements SNAP with the Cambodian Association of Greater Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA), the Fresno Center for New Americans (Fresno, CA), the Newcomers Community Service Center (formerly the Indochinese Community Center of Washington, DC, and Falls Church, VA), and the Research and Development Institute (Houston, TX). Each of these organizations acts as host to a full-time SNAP Field Coordinator. Each Field Coordinator focuses on working with Americans of a different  Southeast Asian American ethnic group: Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, and Vietnamese. In addition, in the project's third year, SEARAC will work with Hmong National Development, Inc. (Washington, DC) and the Southeast Asia Community Resource Center (Rancho Cordova, CA) in order to publish and disseminate research reports.

SNAP provides institution-strengthening, coalition-building, direct-client, research, and information dissemination services that will strengthen refugee individuals, families, and communities. SNAP also ensures  that what is learned from the project will be used to strengthen success-oriented programs among other refugees and immigrants. It  will do this by producing, distributing, and publicizing a multilingual research report on success – and the lack of success – among its target  populations. SNAP's third year will be dedicated to consultation and technical assistance that will bring the research report's results, best practices, and recommendations into the hands of diverse audiences throughout the nation;  and to helping interested organizations make concrete use of research report contents.

Overall, approximately one million dollars will be dedicated to SNAP. Of this amount, approximately $800,000 (80%) will come from Federal sources.

(Click here for more information on SNAP from the SEARAC Website)