One month away: National Refugee & Immigrant Women’s Leadership Conference

In Our Hands: Building Solidarity and Community
9th Annual Refugee & Immigrant Women’s Leadership Conference
November 14-16, 2008, Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel, Atlanta, Georgia

The conference is an opportunity for women leaders from the refugee and immigrant community to share their experience, best practices, network and learn from one another. The Gallery of Change-Makers will highlight their achievements and workshops are organized into the following major thematic categories: Leadership Development, Organizational/Community Development, Personal Growth/Development, Health, Microenterprise Development, Youth and Advocacy.

Participants can register for the full conference or for one day only, and a promotional code from AirTran Airways provides a 10% discount on airfare.

For more information, contact info@riwn.org or 404-299-0180 x 226. Registration materials and the workshop schedule are available online at http://www.riwn.org/.

The conference is only a month away. Register today!

Save the Date: National Conference November 14 to 16, 2008

In Our Hands: Building Solidarity and Community
9th Annual Refugee & Immigrant Women’s Leadership Conference
November 14-16, 2008
Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel, Atlanta, Georgia

Keynote speakers:

• Kabzuag Vaj – Ms. Kabzuag Vaj is a community organizer with Freedom Inc. which organizes services and advocacy for low income communities of color in Dane County, Wisconsin.
• Reaching Across Ethnic Divides to Build Solidarity & Community – A panel discussion of the genesis of three organizations: International Community School, International Women’s House and Tapestri, Inc.: Refugee and Immigrant Coalition Challenging Gender-Based Violence.
• Looking to the Future -- Presentation by our board of directors about the future direction of RWN.

About the Conference: The 9th Annual Refugee & Immigrant Women’s Leadership Conference is an opportunity for women leaders from the refugee and immigrant community to share their experience, best practices, network and learn from one another.

Workshops: organized into the following major thematic categories: Leadership Development, Organizational/Community Development, Personal Growth/Development, Health, Microenterprise Development, Youth and Advocacy.

For more information, contact info@riwn.org or 404-299-0180 x 226. Registration materials will soon be posted online at http://www.riwn.org/.

Grand Opening: Microenterprise Program Success Story

This weekend was the grand opening of the Family Choice Salon, run by one of our microenterprise program clients, Ms. Kumari Ghimery.

Ms. Ghimery came to the US 5 years ago as an asylee, fleeing persecution in Bhutan because she is a member of the Nepalese ethnic minority in Bhutan.

When she came, RWN gave her a job as receptionist, but her real dream was to open her own salon.

She attended the RWN Business Plan Training classes, went to cosmetology school and worked in other salons to gain experience and build a clientele. All along, took microloans for RWN to help her move to the next step.

In case that wasn't enough, she also got married, bought a house in the Atlanta, Georgia suburbs, and started a family.

Finally this summer, with the help of another RWN microloan, she was able to open her own salon:

Family Choice Salon
3153 Sugarloaf Parkway
Suite 107
Lawrenceville, GA 30045
Phone # 770.558.2134
http://www.familychoicesalon.com/

It's open and airy with hair cutting stations in the main area and a room for facials and a room for waxing off the hall in the back. She has three employees to provide those services, while she concentrates of cutting hair and managing the salon.

The salon is located in suburban Gwinnett County, the fastest growing county in the US. It is a suburb of the Atlanta, Georgia area, with many highly rated schools and affordable housing. Therefore, many refugees and immigrants buy their first homes in Gwinnett.

This is a wonderful success story. Not only has she rebuilt her life, but she is contributing to the Atlanta economy and providing employment for others. What a bright spot in a discouraging economy.

Congratulations to Ms. Kumari Ghimery!

UNIFEM/USA 2008 Conference June 21 and 22 in Atlanta

RWN will be participating at the UNIFEM/USA 2008 Annual Meeting and Conference: Creating Change...Improving Lives, Saturday, June 21 and Sunday, June 22. It will be held at the SunTrust Conference Center, 303 Peachtree Street, NE, Atlanta, Georgia.

RWN's executive director will participate on the panel Microfinance: Empowering Women Worldwide. Additionally 6 of RWN's Microenterprise clients -- refugee and immigrant women entrepreneurs -- will have vendor booths at the marketplace.

UNIFEM is the women’s fund at the United Nations. It provides financial and technical assistance to innovative programs and strategies to foster women’s empowerment and gender equality. Placing the advancement of women’s human rights at the center of all of its efforts, UNIFEM focuses its activities on four strategic areas:

• Reducing women’s poverty and exclusion;
• Ending violence against women;
• Halting the spread of HIV/AIDS among women and girls;
• Supporting women’s leadership in governance and post-conflict reconstruction.

To learn more or register for the UNIFEM/USA conference, go to http://www.unifemusa.org/

Board Member Anne Olson honored for lifetime of service

Board member Anne Olson was honored at the 5th Annual Georgia's Legacy: Older Women Active and Alive Past Sixty-Five Awards Luncheon. It was presented by the Georgia Commission on Women, the Georgia Women's Institute, and the Georgia Osteoporosis Initiative.

As described in the program, the luncheon honors

ten outstanding Georgia women who, though past the usual age of retirement, are
still significantly involved and productive

It was a great event and very inspiring for those of us under the age of sixty-five, to see vibrant and vital women into their 80's who are continuing a lifetime of achievement. It certainly gave me something to strive for.

Here is Ms. Olson's biographical statement from the program. At RWN we are extremely fortunate to have someone as talented, committed, and accomplished on our board of directors.

Anne Olson, a feminist/scholar/activist, focusing on gender economic and racial
human rights, retired in 1999 from Emory University School of Nursing, where she
taught nutritiion, after working twenty-five years as federal program
administration for Georgia Department of Education. A member of Atlanta Living Wage Steering Committee, she continues efforts to raise the minimum wage, especially for home healthcare workers, though the Georgia Legislature has yet to approve it! She serves as a planner, fundraiser and facilitator for the leadership team of Project South. She worked on logistics and outreach for last summer's event sponsored by the US Social Forum, attended by 15,000 grass roots organizers, coordinated Amnesty International's Stop Violence against Women campaign, serves on the boards of Women Watch Afrika and Refugee Women's Network. She has worked on Poor People's Day at the Capitol and the Up & Out of Poverty Coalition since 1999. She received the Gerry Conroy Human Rights Activist Award from the Georgia Coalition on Hunger "for her tireless work on human rights, gender equity, racial and economic justice." Anne lives in East Lake Commons, edits the communtiy newsletter, and participates in the Neighborhood Connections and Affordability Committees. She has two children and three grandchildren who live in Boston and West Palm Beach.

RWN on WRFG 89.3 FM

On April 16, RWN was on the radio in Atlanta.

WRFG (W Radio Free Georgia) is the local community radio station where the DJs are all volunteers. A few of RWN's past and present board members and staff have been hosting radio shows on WRFG for many many years.

Yesterday I was the guest on Dr. Asha's show, Health Issues Today. I thought I would have only 10 minutes of her half hour show but we ended up talking the whole time. Time just flew by.

She asked me who were refugees, what issues do refugees face, what resources are available to refugees, etc.

These are issues we address at RWN so it was very easy to talk about.

This is the takeaway message I wanted the listeners to get:

Yes, refugees have endures incredible trauma and hardship -- war, violence, and women deal with sexual assault during the war and in the refugee camps -- and now they are in their new country and working hard to rebuild a life while dealing with culture shock, language barriers, as well as the past trauma. And this is a testimony of the strength of refugee women. And I want people to think positively about refugee women as they rebuild their lives, their families and their and our communities here and now.

New Board Member: Sabrina Shams DeJoannis

RWN is very happy to introduce our newest board member, Ms. Sabrina Shams DeJoannis, engineering and financial analyst at the Georgia Power Company.

Ms. DeJoannis has been a trailblazer from a very early age. She is the first woman in her Bangladeshi family to leave home without being married. She immigrated to the US to pursue her education, and now she works as a woman in the male-dominated engineering field.

This drive to excel is evident during her tenure as president of the Atlanta section of the Society of Women Engineers from July 2005 to June 2007. In that time, she doubled the number of members and in 2006 alone, this newly energized chapter served 1000 middle and high school girls in Atlanta. She now serves as the Southeast Region Treasurer until June 2008. Clearly she is committed to increasing the number of women and girls studying, working, and succeeding in science and technology.

Georgia Power recognizes her leadership potential. She was selected as the first candidate to the first of its kind developmental rotational assignment in SCS Finance, working as a financial analyst to understand the business dimension of her company. Georgia Power is also funding her pursuit of a Master’s in Business Administration. After 2 years as a financial analyst, she will return to power delivery engineering to assume a leadership position.

Ms. Shams DeJoannis is also a graduate of the Destiny Fund, a program offered by the Atlanta Women's Foundation to develop women's philanthropy.

RWN is indeed fortunate to have such talent and dedication to community service on our board of directors.

We are fortunate indeed to