“The idea is to support women who are seeking asylum and to make their transition and waiting period more bearable and sustainable,” said Marciana L. Popescu, Ph.D., website co-founder and associate professor in the Graduate School of School Service. “We want the ability to preserve confidentiality and anonymity for online visitors. This is extremely important because we’re dealing with a population that lives in fear.”

More than 79 million people are displaced worldwide, according to a 2020 report from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, and more than half are women. Tens of thousands are in New York City alone. Few attempt to seek health care services in fear of deportation, and the pandemic has worsened the situation, especially for women asylum seekers, said Popescu. 

Her Migrant Hub was built thanks to a $150,000 grant from the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation. In addition to accessing resources on the site, asylum seekers can share best practices and meet women who have experienced similar struggles. The project began in January; the website was launched in late June in honor of World Refugee Day. 

“It’s designed by the women, down to the colors that are used on the website, the images, the graphics, the logo, the website name itself—everything was done collaboratively and driven by the women who are part of this group,” said Dana Alonzo, Ph.D., website co-founder and GSS professor who specializes in mental health. 

Showing the Experts What’s Missing

The website was developed by a team of about 20 people, including a Fordham graduate student and an alumnus. Because Her Migrant Hub was developed in conjunction with the target audience—the women asylum seekers themselves—it is unlike many resources developed by experts and scholars, said Popescu and Alonzo. 

“They are teaching us what it means to be an asylum seeker, to live in NYC and not be able to get the services you need,” said Alonzo. “They are looking at the website and saying, ‘This is what we’re missing.’” 

Among them is Marthe Kiemde, 36, who fled political persecution in Burkina Faso with her husband while pregnant in 2016. She said that during their first four years in the U.S., they raised their newborn in New York City shelters, where they also received career training and got back on their feet. 

“I know many immigrant women who are struggling right now. They don’t know where to go to get any services, especially in health care. They are afraid to go because they don’t have any papers … But this website is secure,” said Kiemde, who helped research immigration and childcare policies for Her Migrant Hub and now works as a hospital dietary associate. “With this program, we’re going to help many, many women.” 

Another website collaborator is Vanessa Rosales-Linares, 40, an asylum seeker from Venezuela. She said she was an anesthesiologist who fled her native country in 2017 with her husband and 8-year-old daughter after giving medical treatment to government protesters and fearing punishment from political leaders. Rosales-Linares said she now wants to help people who were once in her position. 

“[The website has] good information because it’s from many people who have in the past had the same problems. They are telling their histories and teaching how to improve their situation for new immigrants,” said Rosales-Linares, a website designer for Her Migrant Hub and a nursing student at Lehman College. 

‘A Window Into What Is Happening’

In addition to providing local health care resources, Her Migrant Hub simplifies the asylum seeking process and an asylum seeker’s rights in New York City through text and graphics. It also provides an online forum where women asylum seekers and allies can share their experiences and read stories that help them feel less alone, said Popescu and Alonzo. 

This fall, the website will launch several new features, including expanded translation services; a workshop webinar series designed and co-taught by women asylum seekers; and Her Migrant World, an educational page that takes a deeper look at global migration and the people at the center of it all. 

“We hope that Her Migrant World will be a window into what is happening and why people take so many risks to come here and the reality on the ground,” Popescu said. 

‘This Feels Like Home’ 

After project funding ends in December, Popescu said she is confident that her team will continue to make a difference in the lives of women asylum seekers across the city. Within their team, they have also found a home. 

“We talk all the time. All our joys and sorrows started to be shared in the group, so the group provides support,” said Popescu, adding that they chat via WhatsApp. “At our second meeting or so when we first met, one of the women said, ‘This feels like home.’”

The grants—totaling $600,000— have been awarded by the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation. They will fund University efforts to provide mental health services to young people, help women asylum seekers, and teach English language learners.

Fordham Provost Dennis Jacobs, Ph.D., said he’s grateful to the foundation for supporting the University’s work in the community.

“Fordham is deeply committed to applying its academic and programming expertise in partnership with organizations in the surrounding neighborhood to help address the most pressing needs within the Bronx community,” said Jacobs. “Through the generous support of the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation, Fordham is particularly focused on how it can assist those who have been most devastated by the interconnected crises of 2020.”

The Mother Cabrini Health Foundation provides grants to improve the health and well-being of vulnerable New Yorkers, aiming to eliminate barriers to care. The foundation’s values reflect Fordham’s mission and those of the organization’s namesake, Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, who was known during her lifetime as a staunch advocate for immigrants, children, and the poor. The foundation originated from the 2018 sale of Fidelis Care, a nonprofit health insurer run by the bishops of the Catholic dioceses of New York.

Virtual Mental Health Services

The first grant of $300,000 will support a virtual mental health program to be run by the Graduate School of Education called Clinical Mental Health Services in the Bronx Community. It will use telemental health services to reach at-risk students between the ages of 8 and 16. The program responds to the pandemic-related suspension of existing programs that Fordham delivered at schools and community organizations before the crisis began. Four cohorts of 25 students in need of help—whether from stress related to gun violence, racism, the pandemic, or other factors—will be assessed and receive therapy. The program will offer two 45-minute intensive sessions per week for the students. Anita Vazquez Batisti, Ph.D., associate dean for educational partnerships at GSE, helped facilitate the grant and GSE psychology professor Eric Chen, Ph.D., will direct the program.

Helping Women Asylum Seekers

A second grant of $150,000 will be used to help women asylum seekers in New York City gain access to much-needed mental health care. According to a 2020 report from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, more than 79 million people are displaced worldwide, more than half are under the age of 18, and more than 50% are women. In 2019, there were 46,000 asylum seekers in New York City alone, said Associate Professor Marciana Popescu, Ph.D., of Graduate School of Social Services (GSS). Popescu has extensively researched the problem and will be directing the program with GSS Professor Dana Alonzo, Ph.D., a specialist in mental health treatment. With increasingly restrictive policies pushing asylum seekers to go underground, few attempt to access mental health care services, said Popescu. The pandemic has only made the situation worse—for asylum seekers in general, and for women in particular. The project aims to identify the challenges of these women and connect them to services that are within their rights.

English as a Second Language

An additional $150,000 will go toward expanding the Institute of American Language and Culture’s Community English as a Second Language Program (CESL). That grant follows a $116,000 grant awarded by the foundation in 2019. The program provides free ESL instruction primarily to adults in the Bronx in partnership with churches and other community organizations. The CESL program began in 2018 with financial support from the New York City Department of Youth and Community Development, which has annually renewed funding, scoring the program’s attendance, educational gains, and program management as “above standard.” The Cabrini grant will help the initiative continue to grow. CESL serves more than 300 students and hopes to serve at least 500 a year by 2023.  Institute director James Stabler-Havener will continue to direct the program with Jesús Aceves-Loza, who serves as the institute’s advisor for Latin America.  In spite of the pandemic this year, students continued learning and instructors continued to teach virtually via apps and cell phones. In the coming year, the group plans to build on existing partnerships with community organizations and the city to offer citizenship courses as well. The growing initiative will also provide internship opportunities to underrepresented students at the University.

This spring, a group of 10 Fordham faculty members traveled there to see it for themselves. From March 17 to 22, they visited the Kino Border Initiative, a consortium of six Catholic organizations in the border city of Nogales—both on the Arizona side and the Sonora, Mexico side. Kino aims to promote border and immigration policies that affirm the dignity of the human person and a spirit of binational solidarity.

The trip was funded by Fordham’s Office of Mission Integration and Planning and featured faculty from arts and sciences, the Graduate School of Social Service, the Graduate School of Education, the Gabelli School of Business, and the Law School. The group raised $13,000 to purchase toiletries and necessities for the migrants and documented their time on a blog.

Big Changes in Just One Year

Jacqueline Reich, Ph.D., professor of communications and chair of the Department of Communications and Media Studies, co-led the trip along with Associate Professor of Theology and Acting Associate Provost James McCartin, Ph.D. It was Reich’s second time in Nogales, having worked with Kino in January 2018. Although only 14 months had passed since her last visit, the experience was very different, she said. As before, the group stayed overnight in Arizona and crossed the border to work in a comedor, or cafeteria, in Mexico, that provided meals to people waiting for asylum claims to be heard in the United States.

In 2018, she said, they would typically have one seating of 40 to 50 people—mostly men, a few women, and very few unaccompanied minors. This time, there were multiple seatings with 300 people per meal.

“We spent a lot of time holding babies while people could eat, or entertaining children, or sitting and talking to groups of families that had left Honduras, Guatemala, or regions of Mexico that were affected by gang violence and poverty,” she said.

In addition to serving meals, the group hosted a party at a women’s shelter, met with border patrol agents, and hiked along the border to understand the conditions there. They also attended an “Operation Streamline” hearing in Tuscon, Arizona, where immigrants appear in a group before a judge, who often deported them for being here illegally after two quick questions.

Glenn Hendler, Ph.D., a professor of English and American studies and acting chair of the English department, said he knew a little about the crisis at the border before heading there, but learned a lot from the trip. He was surprised to learn, for instance, that a wall was constructed through the middle of the Nogales in 1994, long before President Donald Trump made building a border wall his signature campaign promise.

‘Never Got to Say Goodbye’

Although he does not speak Spanish, he was able to connect with a 6-year old girl at the comedor whose father was washing dishes nearby.

“It was an incredible joy to make a child who was going through a horrific experience laugh,” he said.

“The next day, we were serving a meal, and I heard a little girl yelling ‘hola, hola,’ and it was the same little girl again. She was happy to see me, and I was happy to see her. But there were so many people there, that they just got rushed out. So, I never got to say goodbye to this little girl. For some reason, that just broke my heart.”

Speaking with the border patrol complicated the picture for Hendler because it showed how difficult the job is, but it did not change his mind about the moral implications of the situation. In fact, he said he now felt more emotionally connected to what had previously been an abstract concept. He also said that the bonding experience he had with the other nine faculty was “very powerful.”

Accompany, Humanize, Complicate

Carey Kasten, Ph.D., associate professor of Spanish, echoed this, saying she was moved by the possibility of future projects at Fordham. Her scholarship touches on issues related to the border, so she was familiar with the situation. But she was moved to learn things like why black water bottles are a must for those crossing the border at night. (They don’t reflect moonlight).

“We were told to accompany, humanize, and complicate. To see those real items that our guide had collected on hikes through the desert, and also to see people get out of a van who’d been deported and go into the soup kitchen we were working in, was something that really stood out,” she said.

She was also shocked at the level of needless suffering taking place. When people are deported to Mexico for instance, they are given back any cash they had on them when they were apprehended in the form of a check. But the checks are only cashable in the United States, so once a week, a nonprofit group called No More Deaths visits the comedor to help people cash them. She also wasn’t impressed with the judge who spoke to them after presiding over the deportation proceedings.

“He said, ‘I’m just carrying out my marching orders.’ And I thought, ‘You’re a lawyer. You could leave and get a different job.’”

She felt more empathy toward border patrol agents. “They have fewer choices, and their job sounds really hard,” she said. “I found it really complicated to parse it all.”

McCartin said the goal of the trip was to give faculty members an experience different from their everyday work life that would also then affect their work life. The group will reunite soon for debriefing and discussion of possible future plans.

One conversation that will always stay with him happened when a man from Honduras asked him if Americans all thought they were criminals.

“I said ‘Oh gosh, no, I have no problem with you.’ This guy was like, ‘Really? I can’t believe that.’ I said ‘No, I can see how you have a sense that that’s how Americans talk about you, and there are plenty of them that do, but there are also a lot of us that don’t really begrudge you trying to have a better life,’” he said.

“This moment of his being surprised that we’re not unified in our attitudes toward people at the border—a lightbulb went on for this guy, and I’ll remember that.”

Carrying Their Stories Back Home

Michael C. McCarthy, S.J., vice president and presidential assistant for planning in the Office of Mission Integration and Planning, said the trip was a necessity, given how immigration is now a major global challenge.

“Because this is such a major social issue and it impacts questions of justice, what we want to be as a society, and how a place like Fordham, as a Jesuit university, tries to develop students, we decided the border would be a great site for this immersion experience for a diverse group of faculty members,” he said.

Reich is making sure the issue lives on, having structured the syllabus of one of her spring classes, Films of Moral Struggle, to include representations of borders and migration. The class is also sending Easter cards to people in detention at the border to bring a little color and humanity into their lives, she said.

Above all, she said she’ll hold onto memories of conversations with the migrants she met, like one with a man at the comedor who was sporting a University of Michigan hat. He’d lived in the U.S. for 22 years before being deported after being stopped for a traffic violation.

“I will always carry their stories with me,” Reich said.

Photos courtesy of Fordham faculty.

This, she said, was despite advances in medications, and major campaigns that reduced the stigma of seeking help for mental illness.

“We’ve had no effect on the rate of suicide; in fact it’s higher than it ever was,” said Alonzo, an associate professor at the Graduate School of Social Service and director of Fordham’s Suicide Prevention Research Program.

She attributes the rise in part to the main focus of suicide prevention research over the years, which has centered more on desperate patients in the emergency room and less on those initially seeking outpatient services. Also, in much of the mental health research, patients’ sociocultural backgrounds are not taken into account.

“What differentiates social work from other mental health professions, like psychiatry or psychology, is that we look at more than just the individual person sitting in front of us. We look at their ecosystem,” she said. “We need to know the populations if we are hoping to help.”

Alonzo said that, up until recently, psychological research groups were largely made up of white males—and then the findings were generalized to everyone. It was a great advance when women and minorities were included, but much nuance is still lost on large groups. For example, Hispanics—although minorities—have a relatively low suicide rate when considered as a single group.

Even then, she said, looking at Hispanics as one whole group can lead to misinformation.

“When we break it down by Hispanic subgroups, we find that Cuban Americans and Mexican Americans have among the lowest rate of suicide of any ethnic group, but Puerto Ricans have a higher rate of suicide by ninefold,” she said.

Assuming risk for an entire group can also have a profound effect on communities, Alonzo said. Limited resources may be diverted to areas where they are not needed.

“A lot of evidence-based practices are largely based on quantitative research, which uses large randomized control trials and less of an emphasis on understanding the population,” she said. “We’re doing a disservice . . . assuming risk for populations that don’t have as much risk, and underestimating risk for populations who are at great risk.”

For example, Alonzo recalled an ad campaign for suicide prevention that appeared on buses running through a Washington Heights neighborhood, where the majority of the population is Dominican. That campaign might have been better placed in a Puerto Rican neighborhood, had research been available, she said.

Alonzo’s own research into suicide prevention found that the point of contact at which the research was conducted didn’t necessarily tell the whole story, because the majority of people who are at risk don’t go for treatment.

“This is a hard population to treat and study,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how great your evidence-based intervention may be if the at-risk individuals are not going to treatment to receive it.”

After finding that most people who came to the ER had already attempted outpatient treatment, Alonzo focused her research on outpatient centers with substantial caseloads.

“Somehow we had missed an opportunity to get them engaged with treatment,” she said. “Once someone goes to an emergency room saying that they’re thinking about suicide, then they’re going to the hospital—which is psychologically and financially burdensome.”

There, she works with patients who are coming in for a first appointment. She implements an onboarding procedure at the moment of intake, where suicide intervention can be initiated “in a way that’s realistic for overworked intake departments with large caseloads.”

“We need to make an impact early on, so that people who go in for an intake [will]experience an immediate benefit to treatment. [This will] limit the likelihood that they will then drop out and end up in the emergency room,” she said.

Alonzo’s intake procedure combines risk assessment and “engagement-focused intervention” alongside standard intake procedures. She said the intervention doesn’t require extensive clinical training. It can be used across personnel, and can be delivered quickly.

“It’s a brief motivational interview that involves personalized feedback on a risk assessment, and then follow-up contact,” she said.

She said most of the research that’s done on suicide focuses on the high-risk behavior, but not on engagement or adherence to treatment.

“We know very little about what keeps them in treatment,” she said. “What we do know is that those who are at the highest risk aren’t going to treatment to begin with, or they drop out very quickly and are not taking advantage of the evidence-based practices that exist to help mitigate their risk.”

She said her intake assessment tool provides personalized feedback that debriefs patients on their condition in everyday language—and with an awareness of their cultural background.

“We’ve learned that at-risk individuals experienced the standard risk assessment and treatment as impersonal and routine,” she said.

“By individualizing our feedback, the feedback itself can become the start of an intervention.”

Although most understand this time of year can bring stress as well as joy, we don’t always plan accordingly. We spoke with Dana Alonzo, Ph.D., associate professor of social work at Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Service, to get some suggestions.

Full transcript below

Patrick Verel: Is it cliché to say that the holidays are stressful, or do you get the sense that folks understand that it’s not going to be all smiles and good cheer this time of year?

Dana Alonzo: I think that what we tend to see is that people have a superficial or anticipatory recognition that this is going to be a stressful time, and, “I have so much to do. I’m going to be spending so much money. How do I find that perfect gift for someone?” And there’s lots of that kind of thinking about the stress, but it doesn’t end up translating into any real planning or prepping for how to manage it, so that by the time the holiday actually comes, I think people do end up feeling quite stressful.

Lots of people tend to think about the holidays as they see them on TV or in the movies or the way they always imagined they would be or wanted them to be. And when they end up in the room with their families, and it doesn’t match that expectation, it can be quite disappointing.

Patrick Verel: What advice do you give to someone who is actually dreading the holiday or having a tough time of it already?

Dana Alonzo: I think the first thing is to manager your expectations. If you don’t expect things to be perfect and put that kind of pressure on yourself, when things aren’t perfect it won’t be that surprising or disappointing. People who are experiencing stress this time of year because they’ve had a major loss in the recent past, planning a new tradition or beginning a new tradition can be really helpful.

So rather than focusing on not having that individual with you to share the things you would typically do with them, doing something different and starting a new tradition can be a really helpful way of managing some of those feelings of loss. I think that self-care is also very important. What tends to fall by the wayside is what you tend to do for yourself on a daily basis that keeps you going.

Patrick Verel: What are the best strategies for people to take?

Dana Alonzo: Going outside and taking a walk, sitting somewhere quiet for five to ten minutes by yourself and just allowing yourself to breathe deeply. Those are things that can be done anywhere. Research shows it’s really effective at allowing people to kind of take a break and reset themselves.

And I think that if you’re relying on things like a class at the gym, or going out with my friends, and then your friends are unavailable or you can’t afford the health club that month because you want to spend your money for presents for someone else. Those are not the best things, but something that you can just do for yourself, by yourself that doesn’t require any additional burden are the things to go to.