We Work to Make Kansas City Feel Like Home
My name is Joan Kelly. I was born in Canada and moved here when I was really young. I’m white and middle class and have all of these privileges. I remember one time when I was in second grade, I was teased and was asked to go in front of the class and pronounce a couple of words because I pronounced them differently. And that really stuck with me my entire life of like,
“if I'm being ‘othered,’ you know, who else is being ‘othered?’”
I knew that I wanted to work around the world with folks so that they feel safe and that they felt cared for.
I lived in Syria for a while, then Ethiopia. I’ve gotten to be in a lot of really unique places. And then I had an epiphany, what am I doing in all of these other places? How naive of me to be this, US citizen, and going to other countries and trying to build in their countries when I know that there’s work to be done in the US to make it a welcoming place. And so that’s what brought me here, back to Kansas City. I went to the University of Kansas for my undergrad. And I’ve been here working as a director with complete commitment to this job because there’s work to be done here to make this place welcoming.
I am the Director of Community Integration here at JVS. As the Director of Community Integration, our focus is to welcome people from the airport all the way up to five years after arrival when they are established and feeling a part of the Kansas City community. That includes opening bank accounts, getting enrolled in social services that exist here, ensuring that people know how to go to the hospital, are enrolled in ESL programming, they’re able to find jobs and change jobs if needed.
People come with a long lifetime of experiences so let's not stop that just because they've been displaced. Let's help them find the career that they always dreamt of having or had when they were abroad.
We have one client that was a neonatal surgeon in Syria and had to come to the United States but the certification and qualification isn’t easily transferable. So we work with the clients to get them on that kind of career pathway.
Basically anything people need so that they can feel they are a part of a community. I’m lucky that we have a team of around 45 folks that help in all those different aspects. I just get to help make it as easy as possible for them in a really complex system.
10 years ago, if you’d asked me how working abroad had helped me , I would have said something to the effect of, “well, I understand cultures better,” or, “I can kind of understand some of the lived experience that these people have because I’ve seen it firsthand.” But I think today, it makes me realize more than anything just how little I know, and just how important it is to lead with questions and not make assumptions. It has informed me to empower people so that they’re making the decisions.
I think a really deep understanding comes from understanding the long arc that brings people to the United States and how difficult a journey that is. How many different experiences, positive and negative, have brought them here and how the desire to go home is valid. So how do we make this feel like home? And how do we actually make this home?
Some of the biggest challenges we have are understanding all of the barriers that exist. For instance, at the airport, we used to be able to see the gate from outside without having to go through security. We would literally be able to see the families walk off planes. We would get phone calls from the airport that said your clients are here and they’ve never used an escalator before and they’re in tears because they don’t know how to get to the arrivals hall. So working with the city and the airport and TSA and all of these kinds of different folks, we get access to meet folks at the gate. What that showed me is some of the most basic barriers that we wouldn’t think exist are very real challenges to overcome. We couldn’t just say okay, “well now we’re just going to go meet these folks that are tough so they’ll figure it out.” We had to pull together quite a few people to get a solution to this.
The hardest part of the job is being a part of such a massive system and knowing that there are some things we can’t change. Like when we have 200 people arriving with an immigration status that no longer is eligible for services because of federal law; because of impasses in the federal government and Congress. We can look at one family and have this plethora of services, but because of where they were born, we can’t provide them with any services or they don’t qualify for this program.
We’ll see this time and time again. That in the United States, we live in a large machine. And there’s a lot of systems that exist to protect people with unintended consequences. And oftentimes, it’s our team that deals with those unintended consequences. On the other side, there’s just the very human piece to it too. The scale that we work at is oftentimes overwhelming. So we can overcome barriers on a systemic level by bringing together stakeholders, but we also can’t lose sight of the individual interactions.
We had a client that at six o’clock called our caseworker and said, “I’m really worried because I think there’s a fire in my kitchen.” And the caseworker was helping another client so they called me and I said, “okay, I’ll go sort it out” and I went and spoke with the client in their house. It turned out they had never had a stove before and there was a pilot light on the stove always burning. And so I explained to them that this is an American style of stove and that the pilot light would always be burning and she expressed real fear. So I said, “well, let’s make dinner together.” And so we sat there and I said what do you want to make? So we were having rice made on one burner and beans on another and we put vegetables on another and she was excited by how quickly everything would cook and how she could do three things at once. And it was a really exciting moment.
I think when we're overcoming all of these large, systemic barriers it's helpful to remember that sometimes the work actually just comes back to “let's make dinner together.”
I think that’s an exciting part of the work that, unfortunately in my role, I don’t get to do very often. But when I do, I go to my caseworkers and I’m like, “The coolest thing happened last night” and they’re like, “yeah, we make dinner a lot. This is what we do.”
At JVS, I’m so proud of the number of folks that work there. It’s worth noting the number of folks that work at JVS that don’t have lived experience as refugees but are compelled to look around and say that Kansas City should be a place where people feel at home; where they feel like a member of their community. That’s a really fabulous thing. There’s nobody in this for the money. That’s not the driving force for anyone that works here. It’s incredibly hard work. Everyone that works here, day in and day out, they’re doing their best to work in these complicated systems and it’s so inspiring. A part of this work brings forward introspective questions about why do I want to do this? Why do I want to help others? Why do I want to help this group? I think when you’re asking those questions, the answer is almost always because I want people to feel at home. The idea of wanting people to feel comfortable and safe.
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