Celebrating National Volunteer Appreciation Month
In April, organizations like the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights celebrate National Volunteer Month in recognition of the hard work, impact, and power volunteers put into building stronger communities.
As a volunteer-based organization, the Young Center is particularly indebted to the contributions of volunteers, who help advance our mission of protecting and promoting the rights of unaccompanied and separated immigrant children.
Our Volunteer Child Advocates (VCA’s) work one-on-one with the children they are paired with. They meet with their assigned child weekly, build a rapport, learn a child’s story, and help amplify their wishes. Cases can run the gamut from children coming to terms with their gender identity to those who are experiencing extreme homesickness. Because each child’s needs are so specific and sensitive, the presence of our VCA’s is incredibly important precisely because they provide consistent and trusted adult presence that can make a child feel like there is someone there for them regardless of their situation.
With each visit, our volunteers inspire and encourage separated children to stay hopeful and to stand in their power, sharing space with them, acknowledging their feelings, and recognizing their identity, needs, and orientation. And because our paradigm places such a high value on the wishes of the child, the role that VCA’s play in spotlighting and amplifying the children’s wishes is paramount.
It goes without saying that without our Volunteer Child Advocates, our reach would be much smaller. Last year alone 364 volunteers served 541 children. Moreover, the time spent serving as Volunteer Child Advocates –from meeting with children, traveling to and from visits, and communicating with Young Center staff — amounted to 3,418 hours, or a total of $ 102,369. Every volunteer contributed in no small part to building a more inclusive and welcoming immigration system that sees immigrant children as children, first and foremost.
While we understand the value and importance of our volunteers year-round, April serves as a point of inflection and a moment of national celebration in honor of volunteers across the world who are serving and enacting change in their communities.
As the only organization providing advocacy services to unaccompanied and separated children, volunteering with the Young Center is unique. While it isn’t always easy, it is incredibly rewarding; and in the face of serious challenges like President Biden’s proposed Asylum Ban, which will make it harder for families with children to file claims for protection, absolutely necessary.
In that sense, National Volunteer Month is a chance to foster a sense of community among our cohorts of VCA’s across our eight office locations, who do special, and often, demanding work, despite what sometimes feels like insurmountable odds.
By Priscilla Guadarrama, National Volunteer Program Manager at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights.
