Unlocking abundance: A human-centered approach to support

A Q&A with Stacy Barnes of Alight

At a moment when immigrant and refugee communities across the U.S. are facing unprecedented fear and uncertainty, Alight is stepping up to provide a vital lifeline. With a legacy spanning nearly 50 years, the organization remains rooted in a unique philosophy of co-creation and human-centered design. We sat down with Stacy Barnes, Co-Director of Alight U.S., to discuss how they are unleashing the abundance of newcomers and meeting the urgent needs of families right here at their base in Minnesota.

Founded nearly 50 years ago, Alight has a long history of supporting newcomers at home and abroad. Can you share the origin of Alight’s mission and how it has evolved over time to meet emerging needs?

When Alight began back in 1978, it was on the Thai-Myanmar border, and from the moment we started until today, we have been very intentional about unleashing the abundance in the people that we’re walking alongside. It has always been about not doing this work alone, and not thinking about ourselves, but thinking about how we lead others, and how we, as facilitators, unlock abundance.

Over time, we have become more strategic about that, building it deep into our global and domestic strategies. It’s something that we think about every single day, and we build it into every interaction that we have with our customers, donors, and people who live in our communities.

Your U.S. team has been instrumental in providing emergency relief to refugee and immigrant families, as well as resources to those who support them. In what ways has Alight responded to help your community during this challenging time?

We like to think about this idea of a journey whenever we’re working with people. In this time we’ve been thinking about how we can help our customers prepare for the possibility of being impacted by Operation Metro Surge and Operation PARRIS.

In our current environment, it’s been a lot of proactive preparation. We were scenario planning ways to help people ensure their children were protected, to make sure they had important documentation with them, and to copy and distribute it to trusted people. We developed playbooks with Know Your Rights information for volunteers to use and also worked with the Community Sponsorship Hub to mobilize sponsors. We have been and continue to help people prepare for the worst-case scenario.

We have been doing grocery deliveries for 2 months but are finding that the emergency need for access to groceries has subsided quite a bit. So we will be discontinuing the shopping for and delivery of groceries. However, in response to SNAP benefit changes, we are partnering with local state and nonprofit partners to deliver boxes of non-perishable food staples to refugee and other new American families in need.

We help people get to their important appointments, such as their re-interviews, which are part of Operation PARRIS, where people with refugee status are being reviewed. We also help make sure that someone can accompany them to these interviews in case of detention.

Through all of these services, we’re looking at them through the lens of consistent volunteer support. We know that meaningful relationships are so important, and those connections form through trust, guidance, and support.

The other part of this is we’re working to figure out how we can help somebody before they might be detained. This includes a lot of work with legal providers, both nationally and here in the Twin Cities, to ensure that, if and when people are detained, we can help them access legal support. Another part of that preparation is planning how we can support a head of household's family with basic necessities if the head of household is detained.

For Welcomers who are not located in the Twin Cities, can you describe what the atmosphere is like today?

There has recently been a decrease in the extremely aggressive tactics we’d been seeing. A judge put a temporary restraining order in place to stop the arrest and transport of detainees across state lines. Because of our close coordination with legal providers, we’ve been able to say with some degree of confidence that those practices are not continuing.

Now, we’re keeping our eyes on what’s happening nationally. Just because it isn’t happening here in Minnesota doesn’t mean that they won’t start in other states.

We’re working with the community to try and process that grief, and do our best to show up for our customers, showing them we’re here to walk alongside them.

We’ve been transitioning our support services to be in-home, so our customers don’t have to travel to meet us. We want to show up for them where they are. So many people didn’t work for weeks or months, and are now facing devastating impacts to their finances. With so many people feeling fear over leaving their homes, they’re back to square one with job searching. We’re mobilizing to support them through application and interview workshops, hoping that they’ll soon feel more comfortable.

There have been many changes regarding Temporary Protected Status and who is legally authorized to work, and we’ve been navigating this with our clients as best we can. Overall, we’re trying to create relationships with employers so that on both their side and the employee side, we can help them navigate the workplace and cultural differences. There are many jobs open in Minnesota, especially in the healthcare industry, where there is a labor shortage, but we’re really working to make sure that the jobs are the right fit.

Alight and Welcome.US are collaborating on a donation drive this March to provide essential goods for newcomers in Minnesota. What are the greatest needs of your community right now, and how will these contributions directly benefit families?

The list of goods we have put together addresses very specific needs we’ve heard from our families; it really reflects the range of individual needs families have. Every dollar a family doesn’t have to spend on household items allows them more flexibility to make rent or even save for the future. Many of our clients are not in a position to save, but every little bit helps toward rent or utility bills.

The items will be set up in a corner of our office, much like a gift shop, where customers will be invited to choose something for themselves when they visit. We may bring a variety of items with us when we go out into the community. It's a trust-building, joy-sparking way to show our customers that we care.

You often talk about co-creating solutions directly with the communities you serve. Why is that important, and how does it impact the long-term outcomes of your initiatives?

The co-creation is that DNA of who we are that I had mentioned in the beginning—it’s the pinnacle of who we are. If you don’t co-create with the communities you’re trying to work in, you can’t do anything at all.

A great example that I’m really proud of is our Community Workshops program. It was initially funded by a grant designed to teach people new to the U.S. important cultural experiences, such as how to open a bank account, how to ride a bus, and how to navigate public safety.

They had been designed to be convenient for teachers, both in location and time of day, but that was eventually completely flipped after speaking with the community and asking about their needs. We moved the location to a restaurant in a neighborhood where more of our customers lived, and then, they started attending.

That’s just a small example of co-creation. We ask questions to assess our community's needs, determining what they want to learn and how to get them there. We want people to know that we are not just serving them, but building something together.

As Alight looks toward the future, what is your vision for how Americans can play a larger role in the global humanitarian response? How can we learn from this crisis response moment to grow a national culture of welcome?

Our U.S. team was built on emergency response as people fled Afghanistan and the war in Ukraine began. So when we took a step back from a day of work, we asked ourselves, “What is it that we really exist here to do? What are we going to be working on, regardless of issues that need to be addressed in the moment?”

It was this dual-sided coin, where we’re serving new Americans and people rebuilding their lives in the United States, and we’re just as committed to working with people who have never experienced displacement so that our social fabric gets stronger.

We believe so much in the need for dialogue, interaction, and meaningful relationships. We are working to create a stronger society, a stronger democracy, and make our communities more vibrant.

As we move toward the future, one of the ways we really want to strengthen that is by creating a ladder of engagement for people to take immediate action, and seeing how we can build that over time. We want to create opportunities for engagement, because those small moments of connection are impactful. We don't want that left up to chance; we're really trying to design this ladder of engagement so those interactions happen.