During my summer in Mexico City consulting at Intrare, I primarily worked on developing training content in the form of presentation for their users, who were mainly refugees and asylum seekers living in Mexico City. However, Intrare also extended its services to trans persons and single mothers. The content aimed to provide support to the refugees familiarizing by them with their rights as refugees in Mexico, common mental health challenges, the Mexican labor market, among a myriad of relevant important topics. I worked closely with Intrare staff and collaborated with staff from other NGOs, such as the IRC and Asylum Access. Moreover, I visited the local governmental refugee aid organization and conducted focus groups with the refugees in order to better understand their needs, which led me to dedicate focused effort toward developing a “Know Your Rights” presentation among others. Additionally, I became involved in strategic planning for user acquisition and provided feedback on operations. In the end, I developed over 30 trainings and tools documents, and I helped improve their user acquisition process.

In one way or another, every course I took at CSSW influenced my work with Intrare. However, the Integrated Social Work with Displaced Persons, Advocacy, and (Power, Race, Oppression, and Privilege (PROP) course work, in addition to my previous work experience, were particularly instrumental to my ability to perform at Intrare and to the framework with which I approached the work. In PROP class, I learned the importance of history and context, and I learned to appreciate and give power to the people I served. In the Integrated Social Work class, I gained invaluable holistic knowledge on the general framework for social work with refugees, which helped me design trainings for displaced persons considering national and international laws. More specifically, a trauma-informed, strength-based approach guided my approach to the work. Finally, from the Advocacy class I learned the importance of giving voice to the people I serve, so I made sure to conduct focus groups with the people I served, and based on the results I designed a “Know Your Rights” presentation to address their concerns.

Intrare is a Mexican startup, and even though most of the staff were able to speak English, I felt obliged to only use Spanish, which meant that I needed to speak, read, and write Spanish at a professional level. It was challenging at the beginning, but I became better and faster at it. Writing emails in Spanish was particularly challenging and slowed down my work pace a bit at the beginning, but I was able to speed it up. Now my Spanish is more fluent.

At the very beginning I was tasked with designing trainings/presentations for refugees in Mexico, and I felt that I didn't have enough knowledge to do the task, and I felt overwhelmed. However, meeting with staff members, staff at other organizations, and the migrants themselves helped me get the task done.

Another challenge was familiarizing myself with Mexican laws pertaining to refugees. I had to read very dry text in Spanish on the subject and to understand it clearly in order to include helpful information for refugees. Researching and reading such text was not an easy task, but I was able to do it. However, at times, I had a designated colleague to help me with the process, so I learned a lot from them. Now I have acquired good knowledge of Mexican systems and how they differ, or not, from the US.

Being immersed in the Mexican refugee aid field was a great, wholesome learning experience. Even though I had already worked in this field for many years in New York — and it has been the focus of my studies — my experience at Intrare was new and different in many ways. It was different geographically; working with a startup was a novel experience for me; and I experienced the early challenges of a young NGO, including user acquisition and strategic planning challenges. I have also learned about the experience of the refugee population in Mexico and saw how different it is from the US, Cyprus, Greece, and Egypt, which took me back to what I have learned at CSSW: not all refugees are the same.

My goal was to get a global experience in the refugee aid field, and the Tamer Center for Social Enterprise helped me get that experience.