Your Voice Matters

“Tu voz importa / Your Voice Matters” is photovoice project with youth and women in Latino farmworker families in Northern California. In partnership with professional researcher and photographer Robyne Hayes, this project will focus on a group of approximately 20 migrants, consisting of a series of educational and experiential workshops that will assist participants in learning how to use the cameras, ultimately being empowered to tell their own stories about their own lives. The project will amplify the unique voices of youth and women by harnessing their artistic abilities to tell their own stories. The outcomes are a series of evocative images and stories that highlight issues that matter most to them, images that will be presented to the community through a public exhibition at a later date.

Through the sharing of images and stories, our project can contribute to changing the current, national narrative of immigrants, moving away from the vilification to instead develop a more compassionate understanding, counteracting the established narrative of "us" versus "them." With these barriers removed, the resilience of the immigrant community can be recognized for the commonality they share with all of us during this exceptionally difficult time.

To that end, our goal is to facilitate pathways for dialogue and action between farmworkers and the community. In order to make this goal a reality, we are asking for your help! Please consider participating in our fundraiser, which will help us secure our remaining materials for instruction, preparation, and exhibition. Every dollar counts.

This collaboration also includes the E Center Migrant Seasonal Head Start, which will serve as the official liaison between MCN and the initiative participants, with Chico State University also providing structural support. This project is similarly being supported through generous contributions from sponsors UCEF - Friends of the Arts, in conjunction with BCAC.tv.

This project was made possible with the support from California Humanities, a nonprofit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Visit calhum.org.

Support Witness to Witness

Clinician burnout and moral injury. Helplessness in the face of cruel policies. Overwhelmed by the inability to serve all those in need.  The people who intersect with the current immigration system – those on the frontlines of caring for immigrants, like health care professionals, community health workers, as well as advocates, attorneys, caseworkers – are suffering as they feel unable to sufficiently provide the kinds of services they know their clients need. Even journalists who cover immigration are suffering!

The Witness to Witness program (W2W) helps the helpers so they can sustain their vital work. We link a frontline worker with a volunteer therapist to provide individualized one-on-one support. We coordinate and facilitate peer support groups, provide webinars, and offer consultation to strengthen individual and organizational resilience.

We’ve reached hundreds of frontline workers: health care providers along the US-Mexico border who are in shock at the violence and desperation their asylum-seeking patients share; social service workers in communities struggling to recover from climate-fueled disasters like in Paradise, California after the fires; and legal aid workers fighting to get their clients out of detention.

We’ve tapped a deep need among immigrant and migrant advocates -- and the need is growing.  Our services are free or sliding scale, and we need your support to make sure we can offer these popular and much-needed services as widely as we can.

Here’s what our partners say:

“I share with my W2W volunteer what I cannot say to anyone else. It’s such an important release.
It helps me carry on.”
- Health care worker in Denver, CO

“I feel so grateful for this model, this way of working, and to you for implementing it…. I believe things would be different if everyone working here was receiving this kind of partnership.”
- Counselor, New York City

“The Witness to Witness program has offered me incredible individual, group, and organizational support. I am so grateful to W2W for sharing their expertise and knowledge with those of us providing direct legal services to low-income immigrants and refugees across the country. W2W truly cares for the caregivers, and I could not be more thankful.”
- Attorney, Memphis, TN

A volunteer therapist with Witness to Witness had this to say:

“This has been a deeply moving experience for me. These partnerships have offered me access to a much-needed sense of agency in the face of injustice I have been alert to, but more typically felt powerless to address. The program has given me an opportunity to be helpful in a meaningful way that supports my preferred self.”

Please help us help the helpers.

Witness to Witness is sponsored by Migrant Clinicians Network, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and is affiliated and endorsed by the American Family Therapy Academy.

Contribute to MCN

Make a tax-deductible gift to Migrant Clinicians Network to help us fight for health justice. Supporting MCN brings free and effective case management for mobile patients, connects an immigrant in detention with emergency care, produces bilingual and low-literacy health and safety materials for immigrant workers and their families, and assures the continuance of MCN's popular webinars for clinicians on the frontline. Thank you for your generosity!

OR

Across the globe, war, violence, economic uncertainty, climate crisis, discrimination, and poverty
are pushing more and more people to move. As migration increases, we’re there, step by step, helping displaced people find their place.

Health Network

Health Network, Migrant Clinicians Network’s unique bridge case management system, saves lives, hundreds of lives, every year. People like Phuong, a patient with tuberculosis who traveled back home to Vietnam in the midst of treatment, and Felicia, who stopped her treatment when she arrived in Central America, prompting a multi-agency international effort, led by Health Network, to help her get back to the doctor. In many cases, without Health Network, patients’ conditions would have worsened; for others, they would have died.

That’s because there is no other system like it. Health Network is the only case management system that provides assistance for people with any health condition moving to any location on the planet. What’s more, our culturally competent management system has been proven cost effective.

           “Health Network is saving lives everyday.” -- Mari Donaghy, Leroy E. Brown Medical Center           

“…the help from Health Network was all I had, I don’t know honestly what I would have done without it.”
-- Health Network prenatal patient

Climate Crisis & Health Equity

When Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico in 2017, thousands of people were cut off from basic services and necessities. Puerto Rico’s rural community health centers quickly stepped up to fill the void, acting as critical points of command in organizing and distributing aid, food, and clean water; overcoming communication and transportation infrastructure breakdown to communicate with neighboring communities; and serving the health needs of their communities despite interruptions in medicine and electricity. These efforts build community resiliency and support networks, which in turn prevents displacement by making communities safe.

MCN, with support from the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation, created the project “Mobilizing Communities in Puerto Rico to Meet the Needs of Vulnerable Populations Before, During, and After a Natural Disaster,” a multi-year effort that seeks to apply a community mobilization framework to emergency preparedness and to reinforce, replicate, and institutionalize the leadership efforts that community health centers showed after the disaster, in preparation for the next one.

“We’re going to reinforce what they have, give the community the capacity to prepare and manage disasters and emergencies with the resources that they already have, instead of relying on federal agencies’ responses, which was a major problem after Maria,” says Marysel Pagán-Santana, MS, DrPH, MCN's Program Manager in Puerto Rico. “We’re there to help facilitate, help [health centers] identify their resources, what they have and don’t have, to build a stronger network between them.”

Medical Review for Immigrants

Thousands of immigrants seeking asylum are arriving at the border each month. Our clinical network reports to us that many of these immigrants have urgent health needs that are going unmet. Exacerbated by a dangerous and long migration, often precipitated by years of toxic stress and traumatic events, and sometimes the direct result of violence in their homelands, these illnesses and injuries can be debilitating and deadly -- and they are too often overlooked while in detention. A 2018 Human Rights Watch report uncovered “subpar and dangerous practices” that constitute “systemic deficits in immigration detention facility health care.”

Medical Review for Immigrants (MRI) seeks to change that. The MCN initiative, launched in June 2018, links clinicians with pro-bono attorneys to get immigrants with urgent health needs out of detention and into care. MRI has already helped a dozen patients, like Maria*, who needed emergency surgery on her leg after being released from detention.

Through MRI, a physician is mobilized to quickly provide a Letter of Declaration for an attorney to request humanitarian parole for a seriously ill immigrant client, which enables the client to be released to receive essential care. Once released, MRI then assures that the client reaches the treatment she needs, with records transfer, follow-up services, and case management. MRI leans on MCN’s clinical network of over 10,000 constituents and over 35 years of experience working with health care providers coast to coast, and utilizes MCN’s Health Network, a proven cost-effective bridge case management system for patients who are moving while needing ongoing care.

For over 35 years, MCN has been dedicated to the fight for health justice. 
In 2021, we are all in, but we need your help to keep moving forward.