United Voices for Newcomer Rights

The United Voices for Newcomer Rights (UVNR) is a community-led organization that was founded in 2015 by refugee/newcomer families, UNM students and advocates. UVNR works to improve the lives of newcomers (refugees, asylum seekers or other immigrants) by addressing both immediate needs as well as longer-term systemic change. To do this effectively, we believe in bringing together community members from the most affected communities to collectively construct the kind of community that we want to see based on democratic and humanistic values.

UVNR runs multiple projects that address the areas outlined above such as:

• The Refugee & Immigrant Well-being Project brings together students from the University of New Mexico and refugee/immigrant families to learn from one another and support the well-being of refugee/immigrant families. We do this using models developed by Paulo Freire, Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School and the Jane Addams School for Democracy.
• Pathways trains and employees refugee and immigrant leaders (from the refugee and immigrant community) to provide community resource navigation and advocacy. The mutual aid approach provides language access to community members in order access hard to access resources such as legal help, health, education and more.
• Early Childhood Education: UVNR works with local refugee and newcomer families to educate them about the importance of ECE and helps them to access existing programs. Additionally, we work with local organizations to provide culturally responsive ECE services that refugees and immigrants can trust to ensure that their linguistic and cultural identities are respected and supported and that children are not forcibly assimilated.
• Refugee/immigrant leadership: UVNR works closely with community leaders from multiple immigrant communities and provides them with job opportunities, training and support in order to build their capacity for mutual aid and advocacy on behalf of their communities.