Refugee Community Partnership

Year Founded: 2015

The Refugee Community Partnership (RCP) designs interventions that improve and protect the health and safety of refugee and migrant residents in the South. RCP mobilizes institutions to eliminate language-based barriers to employment and transform their hiring practices, and support workers in maintaining their rights in the workplace. As one of the only grassroots organizations by and for all refugee and migrant populations in central North Carolina,RCP uses community-centered design to build economic pathways to living-wage careers for limited English proficiency workers that leverage the wealth of skills and expertise within their communities.

RCP operates a dual-pathway economic mobility model that leverages proximity as our most powerful tool for systems change – walking alongside limited English proficiency (LEP) workers to understand nuanced barriers they face, then developing policy and practice recommendations that center language justice approaches for employers. RCP’s approach involves directly supporting LEP workers through navigation and advocacy, while simultaneously gathering experiential data through VAULT (Voices Advancing Until Language Transformation)- the first clearinghouse on language inaccess in the South. This “Relationships First” framework enables RCP to identify specific barriers that block economic mobility and design solutions rooted in workers’ lived experiences. Through deep accompaniment of LEP workers, RCP develops comprehensive recommendations for employers along a spectrum of multilingual and multicultural hiring practices.

RCP’s Language Navigators program demonstrates how language justice principles can transform the labor market to benefit all. Refugee and migrant residents develop professional skills as interpreters, and then are employed by RCP to provide interpretation and accompaniment to LEP patients in high-risk settings, which both improves patient safety, while also creating living-wage positions that value cultural and linguistic expertise.

Explore stories of impact from RCP here.