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SUMMIT REPORT ON CENTRAL AMERICAN CHILDREN SEEKING REFUGE
• Limited financial resources; • Difficulty in providing necessary documentation to enroll in school or health insurance (where available); • A high risk of gang or drug network involvement; • Trauma caused by the dangerous journey; and • Stress caused by family reunification after a long separation. Service providers face a host of challenges as well, including: • Insufficient bilingual and bi-‐cultural staff; • Inadequate training and insufficient professional development opportunities for existing staff of service agencies; • A lack of cultural awareness and knowledge of migration issues among staff; • The limitations of immigration laws; • Insufficient funding and limited budgets; • Limited youth-‐centered and youth-‐driven programming; and • A tendency to use a one-‐size-‐fits-‐all approach to service provision. The key recommendations detailed in this report are based on the promising practices shared by members of organizations present at the summit, and include: • Increase training opportunities for staff who have major contact with the children; • Recruit more bilingual and bicultural staff; • Establish child advocate or navigator programs to help guide children and families through specific services and promote coordination of services; • Conduct culturally adequate outreach and in-‐language advertisement; • Create a platform to network, coordinate, share resources, recruit volunteers, mobilize/organize in support of the children, and develop advocacy and funding strategies; • Advocate for language access laws where they do not exist, and ensure their enforcement; • Collaborate with academic institutions to analyze data to determine gaps in services and inform future funding requests; and • Create a uniform intake process across agencies.