Youth & Family Engagement
Explore Your Community. Build Connections. Feel at Home.
Moving to a new country involves much more than finding housing, employment, or completing paperwork.
It also means learning about a new community, understanding its culture and history, discovering unfamiliar places, building relationships, and developing the confidence to participate in everyday community life.
SSA's Cultural Integration Program helps Slavic immigrants and newcomers explore their new community through education, recreation, shared experiences, and relationship-building.
You can learn about a community by reading about it. But sometimes the best way to understand a new place is to experience it.
The Cultural Integration Program creates opportunities for participants to visit important places, learn about local and American history and culture, experience recreation, discover community resources, and build relationships with others.
Activities may include
The original program model was designed around these interconnected educational, recreational, and relationship-building experiences.
A new community becomes easier to understand when you have opportunities to explore it.
Program activities may introduce participants to important community locations, parks and natural areas, museums, cultural institutions, historical sites, government and civic institutions, educational destinations, recreational opportunities, and other significant locations throughout Washington.
Field trips are not simply recreational. They provide opportunities to learn about the place participants now call home while creating shared experiences with others.
Understanding local and American history can help newcomers better understand the community around them.
Educational activities may explore Spokane and regional history, Washington State, American history, local culture, civic life, community traditions, institutions and public resources, cultural differences and similarities, and everyday aspects of life in the United States.
The goal is not to replace a participant's own culture. It is to provide knowledge that makes participation in a new community easier and more meaningful.
Integration does not require someone to leave their culture behind.
People can preserve their language, traditions, family history, and cultural identity while also becoming active participants in the broader community.
SSA believes these identities can coexist.
Know where you came from.
Understand where you are.
Build connections between both.
Sometimes people build relationships more naturally while doing something together than while sitting in a classroom.
Outdoor and recreational activities may include hiking, bicycling, kayaking, camping, parks and nature experiences, community outings, group recreation, and other seasonal activities.
The original Cultural Integration model intentionally combined recreation with education and community exploration. These experiences can help participants try new activities, develop confidence, reduce isolation, and experience more of the region around them.
Integration also means knowing what opportunities and resources exist.
Participants may be introduced to community organizations, educational resources, recreational opportunities, career opportunities, community services, local institutions, special-interest groups, volunteer opportunities, cultural activities, and other ways to participate in community life.
When someone needs individualized assistance accessing a particular resource, SSA can also connect participants with Resource Navigation & Community Assistance.
Trying unfamiliar activities, visiting new places, meeting new people, and learning how a community works can build confidence over time.
Participants in the earlier program model described experiences such as overcoming fears, becoming more confident, reducing stress, spending meaningful time with family, enjoying nature, and learning more about the United States.
Those outcomes reflect an important part of integration:
Feeling increasingly comfortable participating in the community around you.
Integration happens through relationships as much as information.
The program creates opportunities for newcomers to connect with other participants, established community members, professionals, volunteers, organizations, community leaders, and people with shared interests.
Over time, participants can move from simply discovering the community to actively participating in it.
The Cultural Integration Program is built around a simple progression:
For one participant, that may begin with a field trip. For another, it may be an outdoor activity. Someone else may discover a professional opportunity, meet a new friend, find a community resource, or decide to volunteer.
There is no single way to integrate into a community. The goal is to create more opportunities for those connections to happen.
Led by community experience
Director of Social Integration Program at Spokane Slavic Association
Vladimir brings extensive experience in community leadership, social integration, international missions, and community-based initiatives. Having immigrated to the United States from Ukraine as a teenager and lived in Spokane since 2005, he also brings personal understanding of the process of adapting to a new country while building connections within the local community.
Are you new to the community and interested in discovering more of Spokane, Washington, and the opportunities around you? Join us for an upcoming Cultural Integration activity.
Businesses, cultural institutions, outdoor organizations, educational organizations, professionals, community groups, and volunteers can help create meaningful experiences for program participants.
