A new report evaluating the third year of the New Americans Campaign, a nationwide initiative striving to help legal permanent residents become naturalized citizens, shows the benefits of collaboration and innovation that the campaign has encouraged. The Report produced by Informing Change, shows that the national campaign has helped increase sustainable local capacity for naturalization assistance through its national infrastructure.
Local partners of the New Americans Campaign felt that the network fosters relationships and idea sharing across organizations which is key to providing best practices, legal expertise and training to the network. The report notes that local service providers appreciation the work of site leaders in coordinating events, highlighting the value of devoting resources to collaboration as opposed to expecting often under resourced local groups to invest in developing collaborative structures without support.
One of the most impressive results of New Americans Campaign efforts is the extent to which local partners are doing things differently since the campaign launched. For example, 77 percent of New Americans Campaign partners have experimented with or institutionalized multiple strategies for reaching lawful permanent residents (LPRs), ranging from partnering with government agencies, to ethnic media, to texting. Before the New Americans Campaign’s launch, just 23 percent of its partners did so. And 86 percent have experimented with or institutionalized the use of technology to streamline their work, compared with 12 percent prior to the campaign’s launch.
Challenges still remain, such as better communicating the what documentation is needed for the processing workshops. Visit the New Americans Campaign website for the full report.
