From Thomas Reuters Foundation News:

"Syrian businesswoman Souad Nanaa, a refugee who co-founded SAMA for All, said she wanted to promote cultural exchange.

"In the minds of the people, culture is for the elite – it's not for all," she said by phone from Paris.

"I decided to take on this challenge because of my belief that these people have their own culture, and exchange of culture among people is very good."
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GHR Foundation today announces the winners of its BridgeBuilder global innovation challenge, awarding $1 million to the best ideas that address urgent global issues relating to ‘People on the Move’.

There are currently more than 70.8 million men, women and children who are forcibly displaced worldwide – more than at any time in the past 70 years – and there is an urgent need for radical, innovative solutions.

This year’s BridgeBuilder Challenge saw social innovators, including currently or previously displaced persons, design approaches that will improve conditions for those displaced or better support host communities.

The top five Ideas have been selected for their promise to promote meaningful engagement, greater social cohesion and sustainable, community-led change. They will each receive a share of $1 million in seed funding from GHR Foundation and will join a cohort of innovative organisations working to address urgent needs.

The BridgeBuilder 2019 Top Ideas are as follows:

• Top Manta (Barcelona, Spain) – Activating a migrant-led streetwear movement for opportunity and solidarity

• Five One Labs (Kurdistan Region, Iraq) – Incubating the post-conflict potential of youth- and women-founded start-ups

• SAMA for All (Paris, France) – Transforming cultural exchanges by training newcomers as art interpreters

• FaithAction (United States) – Reimagining the i.d. card to foster trust and safety among newneighbors

​ • Talent Beyond Boundaries (MENA, Australia & Canada) – Unlocking global pathways to international employment and safety for refugees

Minneapolis-based GHR Foundation runs the annual Challenge in collaboration with OpenIDEO, the open innovation practice from global design firm IDEO. In its third year, BridgeBuilder gathered over 450 ideas from 30,000 participants in 165 countries. Materials were translated into 11 languages resulting in 71 ideas submitted by people who are currently or have previously experienced displacement.

Submissions were collaborative, principles-based, community-rooted and people-centered – all building bridges in unique, innovative ways.

Amy Goldman, chief executive officer and chair of GHR Foundation, said:
“For our third BridgeBuilder, People on the Move was a natural focus. We wanted to spotlight and support ideas that are desperately needed to improve the lives of migrants and refugees. More than that, though, we wanted to help change the narrative – to elevate the status of those who have experienced displacement as skilled and creative innovators themselves.”
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Jason Rissman, managing director of OpenIDEO, added:
"We’ve been so inspired by the global response to BridgeBuilder this year. Yet again, all of the ideas submitted were bold, creative and full of potential. We are especially delighted to count people with firsthand experience amongst our winners – and we’re confident that this cohort will continue to build on their successes to date, creating genuine impact for this often underserved and overlooked community."

Watch the video to learn more about this year's BridgeBuilders.

From the the Telegraph:

"In May, Masa joined NaTakallam and started teaching Arabic to students in England, Scotland, America, Switzerland.
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"It was a step back into the community," she said. "It isn't just about the money, it's been about finding an interest and a challenge in something again."

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Through 2018 and into the current year, GHR has supported initiatives addressing the root causes of migration and the life-long harm done by family separation and child detention in the United States.
 
This work is especially pertinent to GHR’s organizational priorities, as the Foundation  envisions a world where all children—especially those at risk of losing or without parental care—are living in a stable, loving, long-term family. Emerging evidence shows that when communities and decision makers support approaches that prioritize families rather than remove children, the relationships children need for healthy development are safeguarded.  
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Emergency Funding
June 2018 & August 2019
 
USCCB/Migration and Refugee Services to support advocacy efforts
Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC) to offer legal assistance
Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley (2018) and Catholic Charities USA to provide direct services
 
Shifting Mindsets on Migration with New Narratives
August 2018-April 2019
 
Nairobi-based BRIGHT Magazine published a series on family separation at the US border made possible by GHR funding. An award-winning digital publication, BRIGHT covers fresh, relevant stories related to health, education, and social impact. Bringing marginalized narratives to the forefront, and offering human faces to the broader, more sensational stories that circulate widely in the news cycle, BRIGHT pushes the boundaries of conventional journalism. Focusing on “solutions-oriented stories” about social change, BRIGHT brings a rich, creative lens on social good to people who crave more nuanced perspectives on these topics.
Instead of reporting the day's news at the border, we were looking to go a little deeper, investigating questions like what are the root causes of the crisis? What are the reasons people are fleeing Central America? Who is responding to the problem effectively? As part of the series, BRIGHT received overwhelming response to its first graphic novel, “They Returned My Daughter, But She Never Truly Came Home”, depicting the real-life story of a six-year-old Adayanci and her father from Guatemala.

Protecting Human Dignity with New Approaches
March 2018-present
 
The Color Movement, in partnership with Alight (formerly American Refugee Committee) is a bold, hopeful, new initiative first launched in El Salvador—where the seeds of this movement will take root. For decades, the Catholic Sisters of El Salvador have worked on some of the most difficult issues facing the country—things like debilitating gang violence, extreme poverty, and human trafficking that cause people to lose hope and leave home to seek futures elsewhere. The Color Movement unites those Sisters in their joint cause of doing their best by the people they serve, provides them more resources to do so, and shares their stories and impact to the outside world.
 
Alight, named ‘Most Innovative 2019’ by Fast Company, has been testing the Color Movement concept, deepening its learning of how Sisters in El Salvador strengthen communities and family resilience. Prototypes of the three design principles under the Color Movement umbrella have been launched: 1) a beautiful, hopeful, and unifying brand, 2) bringing real, tangible resources to Sisters through their ideas to make change, and 3) connecting communities, Sisters, and the outside world through best-practice sharing and storytelling. Both Sisters and youth are feeling united by the brand, inspiring creativity and joy through the simple act of bringing the Color Movement to life, together.

The Color Movement project is operational in La Chacra and Apopa and the Sisters, youth and their families are feeling united and inspired through bringing The Color Movement bus, coffee shop and computer lab to life, together. Alight felt the momentum shift when Jefferson Rafael, a 15-year old youth leader in Apopa, said “We are making history here.” Sister Conchy of Apopa told us, “This has already made a huge difference. We are so happy and excited to what the future will bring.”

July 2019-present
 
In September, GHR and Alight gathered thirty-six non-profit leaders, advocates, artists, community members, press and others in Bisbee, AZ and Agua Prieta, MX for an immersive human-centered design experience to learn together, to build new connections, and to protect human dignity at the Mexico-U.S. border. The goal was to see first-hand the incredible work already being done on both sides of the border and co-create new ways for Sisters and the broader network to coordinate action and expand support of children and families on the move.  The border design trip was co-convened with Hilton Foundation and Hilton Fund for Sisters and sessions were facilitated by IDEO.org.
 
Together, we asked ourselves: How might we and our abundant network of partners create spaces that embody the migrants’ dream? Participants listened deeply to and learned from people on the move while honoring their experience, then worked to brainstorm tangible new approaches.  What emerged from the co-creative session is not a ‘solution’, but a concept that enables people on the move and those in their service to pause, reimagine the migration experience and begin to understand what more is possible:
 
‘El Santuario’ is a community of spaces that work together to improve the migrant experience, elevate the work of Sisters and service providers, and create volunteer experiences to further its mission.  The sanctuary contributes to migrants’ and asylum seekers’ ability to achieve a future of abundance and choice wherever they settle.  It provides safe spaces where their dreams can start to come to life, before they’ve even arrived at—or crossed—the border. It also creates an opportunity to leverage the work of Sisters, volunteers, and a network of actors to serve in sanctuaries.
 
The partners are in the process of identifying a shelter within the network of border agencies to pilot 'El Santuario' concept for evaluation and iteration. The vision is to scale these spaces beyond the initial location to a series of locations and, eventually, to a network of sanctuaries across different cities and countries around the world as the network of partners, service providers and volunteers expands.

GHR Foundation's Children in Families funding supports child protection interventions that strengthen families, respond to children without family care and drive further evidence of innovative approaches. ​

GHR envisions a world where all children—especially those without, or at risk of losing, parental care—are living in a stable, positive, long-term family.

In 2015 the Good Shepherd Sisters of Sri Lanka committed to serving children through community-based programming aligned with the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child.  Their decision was fueled by growing appreciation for the importance of family and community for a child’s well-being. 

According to Sister Rasangi, Community Development Program Officer, “…it is our responsibility to empower the families and the entire community [in] creating a better place for our children. Institutional care should be the last solution for child protection.” 

Working carefully, the Good Shepherd sisters have reunited children with their families, reducing the number of children in their residential care institutions from 800 to 480 in 3 years.  

At the same time, the Sisters have started five community-based programs in fishing villages and tea plantations.  Here, the Sisters have helped create child friendly safe spaces where over 1,000 children socialize after school and access services.  They have facilitated support groups for families, but especially for women who play an important role in children’s lives.  Everyone has a role in ensuring children’s safety and well-being within their families.

In this video, see how sisters are supporting efforts to keep children in families.  

In May 2019, GHR partnered with UISG Roma to host the New Approaches to the Institutional Care of Children workshop. Uplifting the central tenets of GHR’s Children in Families work, the workshop explored efforts to move beyond the institutional care of children towards community - and family -based models, that enable children to live healthier, happier lives – well into adulthood.

To that end, illustrating the reach of Catholic-run institutions around the world was a focal point of the convening. GHR partnered with Goodlands, a cartography organization, to create the first global illustrations of Catholic orphanages; hospitals; dispensaries; communities and institutions for individuals with Hansen’s disease (leprosy); matrimonial advice centers; unspecified welfare institutions; re-education centers; homes for the elderly ill, infirm, and handicapped; children’s nurseries; and population from 1980 to  2016.

Mining several decades of data from the Vatican’s Annuarium Statisticum Eccleasiea, cleaning it and joining it to geodata sets of historical and current country boundaries, Goodlands created a significant number of web-based map applications, analyses, and infographics. An example of these is the above time lapse, which illustrates the global spread of Catholic orphanages between 1980 and 2016. These resources have proved crucial in developing strategies to gradually transition from institutional care for children.
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Founder Molly Burhans, who led the collaboration with GHR on this project, has recently been recognized by the United Nations Environment Program for her groundbreaking work in digitally mapping the land assets of one of the world’s largest land-owners—the Catholic Church. 

​GHR Foundation believes education can transform an individual as it did Gerry Rauenhorst, one of our founders, a first-generation college student and a St. Thomas alum. The beginning of this school year marks a point of pride for GHR, as the inaugural cohort of GHR Fellows begins their first year at the University of St. Thomas.

A partnership between GHR Foundation and the St. Thomas Opus College of Business, the GHR Fellows program is an endowed scholarship for business majors. This highly competitive program is designed to attract future business leaders who exemplify the mission of the university and model GHR values: globally-minded, ethics-oriented changemakers who embody the entrepreneurial spirit, and seek to create enduring value for society.

Ten GHR Fellows have been selected to receive scholarships providing them with full tuition for four years, a fully funded J-Term study abroad experience, curated programming, customized social entrepreneurship opportunities and more. In offering this scholarship, the university will be able to recruit and retain excellent students who might not otherwise have access to such an opportunity. 

Representing a diverse range of backgrounds, the inaugural cohort of GHR Fellows is composed of ten students with outstanding track records, of extraordinary promise, who bring with them a variety of enriching experiences, skills and stories.

Tri Nhan Pham, a first-generation student born in Vietnam and raised in Shakopee, MN, said of the program: “My goal is simple: to leave a legacy that my mom would be proud of. I am ready and excited to take on everything that St. Thomas and the GHR Fellows program has to offer.” 

Learn more about GHR’s support of innovative, high-quality education at Marquette University, St. Catherine University and the University of St. Thomas by visiting our Higher Education Initiative.

From the New York Times:

"The number of nuns in the United States has collapsed from 180,000 in 1965 to below 50,000 today. Sisters are passing leadership at Catholic hospitals and schools to lay people. Some have even begun talking about their mission here in America as being complete.

At the same time, millennials are the least religious group of people in America — only about 27 percent attend weekly religious services. Young women who aspire to lives of good works without the burden of a husband are quite able to do that now without Catholicism.

Yet for small pockets of the young, urban and progressive, the convent is calling. Their radical politics took them all the way around and back to the Catholic Church."

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