Gazette.net
by Agnes Jasinski
Casa of Maryland interns gain experience in advocacy, organizing
College students Sukhdeep Kaur and Daniela Vann come from countries that are a world apart. But it is their shared experiences that brought them together this summer for one cause — to reach out to the area’s immigrants and get them organized.
"This seemed like something I wouldn’t normally do. Organizing. ... I didn’t have any background in that,” said 18-year-old Kaur of Silver Spring.
‘‘If you don’t consult the community of people you’re fighting for, you’re not addressing the problem,” said 21-year-old Vann of Potomac. The two were given the opportunity to intern at the Silver Spring office of Casa of Maryland this summer through a fellowship from Generation Change, a program run by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Community Change. The 10-week program, designed to encourage college students to get into community organizing, ended today. Both said they hope their work with the immigrant advocacy group will be a springboard in finding similar opportunities.
‘‘I know now that I really have a passion for this kind of work,” Kaur said. Kaur, an incoming sophomore at Rice University in Houston, worked mainly with Indian domestic workers this summer, using her native language of Punjabi to better relate to a population she said would not get involved without aggressive outreach. Vann, an incoming senior at the University of Maryland, College Park, focused on day laborers and Casa’s workers centers, and attended meetings in the Latino community to hear about the immigrants’ fears and concerns.
Both are immigrants themselves with parents who sought a better life for their children in the United States. Kaur left the northern India state of Punjab with her family at age 3. She was raised in the Sikh religion, and said she hopes to pursue civil rights law to help prevent the discrimination she and her family felt after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
‘‘She wanted to make a change, and it seems that through this experience, she had the control to make a change,” said Kaur’s older sister, Amrit.
Vann arrived in America from Mexico City at age 10. Her great-grandparents were Jewish labor leaders in Poland when they arrived in Mexico in the 1920s to flee anti-Semitism.
‘‘Even as a little girl, she always felt an empathy toward the outsider, the underdog,” her mother, Daniela Vann, said. Kim Propeack, Casa’s director of community organizing and the interns’ supervisor, said the girls faced the same challenges Casa’s fulltime employees faced, and dealt with similar setbacks — the failure of comprehensive immigration reform in the U.S. Congress, ordinances targeting illegal immigrants in Virginia and questions about police enforcement of immigration law in Montgomery County.
‘‘I think both of them were really able to see on a day-to-day basis the difficult nature of doing this kind of work in the current political climate we live in,” Propeack said. ‘‘At least one time each week, we were all dejected. ... But it’s impossible not to still be heartened by the level of continuing commitment.”
The next step for both is school in the fall. Kaur hopes to become a civil rights attorney, Vann a community organizer. Their unique summer job opened their eyes, Propeack said, to the possibilities of youth making a difference.
‘‘This really broadened my ideas of the issues I wanted to work with,” Kaur said.
‘‘You can create change by creating power at the local level,” Vann said.
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