The State of Welcoming in America with Rachel Perić
About This Episode
In a nation increasingly riven by polarization and mistrust, the spirit of "civitas"—the collective body coming together for good—can feel like a distant dream. But amidst this bleak landscape, rays of hope shine through in the form of organizations like Welcoming America.
This week, Carrie Fox sits down with Rachel Perić, Executive Director of Welcoming America, to discuss their new report, "The State of Welcoming." Perić shares her powerful personal story and sheds light on how creating a culture of belonging for immigrants and refugees can strengthen the social fabric of entire communities.
From the economic benefits to the democratic necessity, Perić outlines the "five whys" that underscore the vital importance of the welcoming movement. She cites success stories like Dayton, Ohio, a Rust Belt city that reversed a 50-year population decline by becoming a leader in immigrant inclusion.
This work is not without its challenges. Perić candidly discusses the dehumanizing narratives that scapegoat newcomers and the global forces displacing people at an unprecedented scale. Yet through it all, her message is one of determined hope: with intention and infrastructure, we can build welcoming communities equipped to meet the defining challenges of our time.
Anyone yearning to rekindle the spirit of civitas in an age of division, this is your episode. It will leave you inspired by the power of human connection and moved to join the growing chorus of upstanders working to ensure that everyone—no matter their origins—can belong and thrive in the place they call home.
Our great thanks to Rachel Perić for joining us for Mission Forward this week.
Links & Notes
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Speaker 1:
Breaking news.
Speaker 2:
Breaking news.
Speaker 3:
It's the year of the chatbot.
Speaker 4:
The latest setback for climate activist.
Speaker 5:
The latest Supreme Court ruling.
Speaker 6:
The court essentially redefined-
Speaker 7:
In the latest Supreme Court ruling, the court is set to redefine.
Rachel Perić:
Welcoming is at the heart of healing some of the most complex challenges of our time, from the loneliness epidemic to bridging social, political, and economic divides.
Carrie Fox:
Hi there and welcome to the Mission Forward podcast. I'm Carrie Fox, your host and CEO of Mission Partners, a social impact communications firm and certified B Corporation. Thanks for tuning in to today's episode.
That was the voice of Rachel Perić, executive director of Welcoming America, a nonprofit nonpartisan organization that leads a movement of inclusive communities becoming more prosperous by ensuring everyone belongs. And if you're thinking what I'm thinking, yes, everyone should know about the work of Welcoming America. And if there ever was a time for this conversation with Rachel, well it's right now.
So in preparing for today's conversation, I've had some words on my mind. Words like immigrant, refugee, asylum seeker, migrant, incomer, and some less desirable words too, like illegal and alien. We're going to get to some of those words today and how our understanding of those words shape how we understand the issue and opportunity of immigration in America.
But first I'm going to introduce another word that I've had on my mind recently, and that's civitas. So it's a Latin term, and if you haven't heard of it, civitas is aspirational really in nature. And it represents the spirit of what is possible when a collective body comes together for good. Civitas represents that mutuality and often unspoken contract that is binding all people together, each person having responsibility and rights to contribute to the betterment of a community. And I say aspirational because it really is something that we can constantly be striving for civitas in our communities.
And we have lost so much of our civitas in recent years. I hear so many people who are terrified of the other side. A 2020 Pew survey found that in astounding 90% of voters on every side believed that a victory by the other side would lead to lasting harm for the country. And in 2024, while the polls show that voters don't approve of either President Joe Biden or former President Donald Trump, polarization is at an all time high and fear of the other is skyrocketing. 58% of Americans say they always, or sometimes feel like no one knows them well. And at any point it can, as if we are divided more than we're united.
Now, we can take that stat for what it is and we can start to feel hopeless about our future, or we can acknowledge the state of our nation and act to do something about it. Today's guest is doing more than something about it. As noted, Rachel Perić leads Welcoming America, and her organization has just released a groundbreaking new report called The State of Welcoming, which you will have an early look into in this episode.
Rachel, I am so excited to have you here to share what you found and to call us into this movement with you.
Rachel Perić:
Thank you so much for having me, Carrie. It's really wonderful to be here. And I love this idea of civitas.
Carrie Fox:
So I do too. And I really do feel like Welcoming America is instilling it back in communities. You're reminding us what it's like for a community to work together. You have such a strong powerful story, Rachel, what draws you into this work? For folks who don't know you and your work, I wonder if you'll share a little bit more about you.
Rachel Perić:
Sure, I'm happy to. And I'm happy to with you, especially because I think more than anyone, you understand the power of story. And in my life, the stories that I grew up with were the stories of how my own family came to the United States as immigrants, as refugees, technically in the late 1940s. I grew up with the stories, especially of my grandmother who at the age of 15 in rural Poland as a Jewish girl, had been separated from her family when Nazis had occupied her village. And that story was so formative for me because what it was filled with was the people who turned her away and the people who saved her. And when I go back and think about that story of survival, the key was really about how people made decisions in the moment that weren't based on how they understood my grandmother in terms of the status that was being defined for her under that regime. They were understanding her as a human and as a neighbor.
And I think all of us in this sort of quest I've been on since growing up with these stories and what brought me to Welcoming America, all of us, I think regardless of our political affiliations, regardless of where we were born, whether we identify as immigrants or not as immigrants, our race or any number of other things, I think all of us can come back to this real sense of our shared humanity and make decisions that really start from that position and recognize others' humanity as well. And that is the north star that I feel has guided me and guides the work of Welcoming America today.
Carrie Fox:
Your story is making me think of my Ethiopian neighbor whose favorite line is neighbor, is family, and what a beautiful sentiment that is on what you experienced, what your grandmother experienced, that truly neighbor is family. And if we can get back to that feeling, universally, feeling and acting that what that would mean for the state of our nation and our future.
Rachel Perić:
Yeah, I love that. And I think all over the world there are these traditions of neighborliness. I mean, of course in my grandmother's story, there were also many neighbors that turned her out and turned against her. And I think we see both of these things today in our culture here in the United States and around the world. And there are many forces working to pull us into the hate and vitriol that we see framing not only the debate around immigrants and immigration, but so many questions of who gets to belong in our society, who gets to call themselves an American here in the United States and in the large request for democracy around the world.
Carrie Fox:
Well, and that brings us pretty squarely to the state of Welcoming. And I'd love to hear a little more about this report and why you felt it was so important to report out on the state of Welcoming in this 2024.
Rachel Perić:
Of course. Well, it might be helpful to just say a little bit about what we even mean by Welcoming and who Welcoming America is. As an organization, we have been around for 15 years, 2024 is our 15-year anniversary. And our work really comes out of grassroots efforts to try to turn around the narrative that was really scapegoating immigrants and blaming them for problems that we see as really societal challenges and wanting to get behind some of that animosity and really create a culture of connection between neighbors, immigrants and non-immigrants. And also support communities in putting policies and practices in place that back up the values of being welcoming and really working to ensure that everyone, inclusive of people who come with a migrant background, can really belong and fully participate at a community level. And I think for a lot of people, when you pick up a newspaper and you read about immigrants or the issue of immigration, what we tend to hear is a lot of very polarizing narratives and a lot of very dehumanizing narratives.
So one of the reasons why we wanted to create something called the state of Welcoming was to really show in this moment when people are talking a lot about immigration, that there is some really powerful work that has been happening over the last 15 years in communities that I think really reflects back to the earlier part of our conversation, work that really reflects the best of who we can be as neighbors in embracing one another and working actively to make sure that immigrant or non-immigrant, all of us can really belong and thrive in the places we call home no matter where we've come from.
Carrie Fox:
I've told a lot of people about Welcoming America since first meeting you, Rachel, and every time I do, the first question is almost always the same. People say, "Do I live in a welcoming community? How do I find out if I live in a welcoming community?" So can you answer that for me?
Rachel Perić:
Well, I love that people want to know if they live in a welcoming community because we want all communities to be welcoming and we could sure use your help in that. One of the things that we have done at Welcoming America is create a framework that communities can use to assess how welcoming they are and to make improvements in the work that's needed to make sure that people can be full participants in the civic, social and economic of communities. We call that our welcoming standard, and we run a program called Certified Welcoming where we go in and do an audit against that standard. And if you meet that criteria, then your community can be certified as a welcoming place. And right now, there are 24 cities and counties in the United States that have been certified as welcoming. In our sister countries of Australia and New Zealand, there are also accreditation processes for cities and towns there as well.
And we hope one day all over the world there'll be a similar process for any community that wants to do this work. We're hoping to get to 50 places certified as welcoming by the year 2026, which is when the United States celebrates 250 years. And we think that we'll send a strong message about the country that we're becoming and also the work that's needed not just one time, but in an ongoing way to make sure that everyone can really thrive.
Carrie Fox:
Great. And let's talk about why this matters so much because you say 24 now getting to 50, my hope is very soon after it explodes much bigger than that because the power of what welcoming does within a community, you lay out these five whys of welcoming. Can you talk a little bit about why welcoming matters?
Rachel Perić:
Sure. And I think one thing I want to say even before talking about the why is I think a lot of people intuitively understand this value of what it means to be welcoming. But one of the things that we've done at Welcoming America in partnership with our members across the country is really break that down into a very practical set of things that communities can be doing to build trust between neighbors, to create an infrastructure within local government that helps bring down barriers, whether that's language barriers or being able to access a job or participate more fully, whether it's in your child's school or maybe civically really breaking those things down. And what we found is that when that happens, that really creates the conditions for what you refer to as the five whys, things that are really fundamental for a thriving democracy, for building trust between people.
So we know in a lot of emergency situations, what helps a community move through, whether we're talking about a public health emergency like COVID or maybe a natural disaster, is when there really is this strong sense of cohesion and networks in a community that can mobilize very quickly based on trust and relationships. And in a lot of communities where there has been a big change in demographics, that doesn't naturally happen without some intention. So communities are much better positioned when those relationships have been built, when there's a thoughtfulness about how information gets out to communities that might be very isolated, they're much better positioned to respond emergency situation, but also much more resilient to the polarization that we started off this call talking about, because when there are active efforts to divide communities that trust and sense of connection and sense of humanity is something that we can all turn back to be more resilient to those dangerous narratives that seek to other us.
Carrie Fox:
There's so much in there, Rachel, and I'm going to have folks go and probably rewind and listen again to understand just how important this work is. You just were talking earlier about the dehumanizing language and as we're coming off of this, I mean really it's a behavior shift. It's a mind shift of literally how you understand the issue of immigration in America, migration in America, the opportunity that is often lost in the fear and danger of conversations that we see. And Dayton Ohio, maybe as one example or if you want to point to another of the power of what happens when we reimagine the power of welcoming in a community.
Rachel Perić:
Yes. I love Dayton Ohio and their story, which if we go back in time to 2011, so this was the time in the United States when some of the most restrictionist anti-immigrant policies were being passed. Arizona's SB 1070, show me your papers law. And basically the message behind those laws was, we don't want you get out. And Dayton said, "We want to go the other way. We actually want to be the most welcoming city in the country." And they started that process by bringing the community together and saying, "What would it actually look like for us to be a welcoming place? And to be a welcoming place, not only for new people arriving here, but really for the community as a whole." And from that plan, they created an infrastructure and a broad coalition that has worked over many years to make it easier to access citizenship, to open a business on Main Street, to find common ground with a neighbor, whether that's over a soccer pitch or in a school setting. And they also became the first city in the country to be certified as welcoming.
And one of the interesting things about Dayton is like many cities in the United States, Dayton had been losing population for about 50 years. And for the first time, was able to turn that around, which has huge economic implications for a city like Dayton in terms of rebounding from a slump and being able to support the community as a whole. And we've seen that to be the case. I think so much of the immigration narrative is dominated by this idea of scarcity and immigrants as takers, but what the data actually shows. And in fact, there was a new report that just came out from the Congressional budget office, $7 trillion is the positive impact on our GDP from migration. So actually. This is a story of abundance really and contribution.
Carrie Fox:
So welcoming contributes to strengthening the economy. That's one of your strong why's. You talk about in the report, welcoming Fosters belonging. We've heard you start to talk about that already. Welcoming contributes to a thriving democracy, welcoming counteracts racism and hate, and welcoming informs effective and equitable policies. So five really clear and powerful examples of what welcoming can do inside a community. When you took a step back and thought about the impact of your work over time, these last 15 years, you mentioned this at the top, almost for every success, there's been a challenge that this is not easy work, none of this is intended to be easy work, but you've learned some really powerful lessons in this work that are helping you think about where this work is going next. Can you share a little bit about that?
Rachel Perić:
Sure. Well, I think one of the reasons why Welcoming America came to be in the first place was because there were a lot of disparate efforts happening all over the country that wanted to connect through a network and be able to work not in isolation, but really in a larger community. I always think of our network of doers across the country and now globally as a community of belonging for people advancing belonging. And I think the power of that and the power of what those leaders have done in their own communities to gather all kinds of different institutions and partners to row together toward a more welcoming society has just been incredible. I think back in 2011, it was rare to see a local government that had a proactive stance. Today we have I think more than 80 offices of new Americans across the country who were working on this. Back in 2011, there were very few voices speaking out from outside of the core advocate community. And now we've seen so many people and institutions from arts organizations to chambers of commerce to philanthropy in communities stepping forward as I think the story of upstanders that I started with to say, no, this is something that we deeply care about, that we understand is an essential part of what makes for a healthy community and is something that we need to invest in.
Carrie Fox:
What stands in your way, or what stands in the way of this work?
Rachel Perić:
Well, I think we really see welcoming work as heart work that's human to human, but also really a substantial infrastructure that needs to be built in communities to prepare for demographic change. And I think one of the biggest challenges that we face in our democracies right now is that this has become the fault line that a lot of populist politicians are running on now, dividing us over the very fraught issue of immigration. But I think what keeps me positive and keeps me energized in this work is really seeing that this is something that we can actually be successful at. That despite what we see when we pick up a newspaper or that immigration is this intractable challenge, what communities, I think actually are the proof point for is that we can get this right. And in fact, many communities are getting this right and are benefiting as a result of that.
Now, I think the challenge there is that it's not happening at the scale that we need to now just given how many people are being displaced by war and by the same populist leaders who are feeding off of these dangerous narratives. And that's a cycle that we need to interrupt. But also with our changing climate and a global economy, the movement of people is going to happen at a much more rapid and larger scale than I think we can even imagine. And so this issue of migration is an epic issue of our time, and there is a solution set for it, and we can be welcoming, but we need to invest now and prepare now and build infrastructure to be able to meet that moment. And so that's really a core message for us at Welcoming America and with the state of welcoming.
Carrie Fox:
Rachel, I've learned so much from you and your organization over the last few months, and one of the things that really sticks with me is there are so many different ways to advance this work, right? You were just talking about the work that specifically mayors and elected leaders are taking in policy change, which is critical to that long-term movement change. But there's also change that employers can take. There's change that journalists can take, right? In the words that we use and how we use them, you might recall, I think it was 2012 or 2013 when the Associated Press sunset certain words because they realized that the words they were using were having a direct effect on the way folks understood the issue. So illegal immigrant, that no person is illegal in making sure that they were careful about their words because they knew the power of their words. And that goes to everyone who's listening too, being mindful of the words we use and how we use them, because that shapes how we understand society.
But in this report, you talk about so many different on-ramps to this work, which feel really important. And so I do have a few more questions for you, but I do want to just pause here and have you share how people can learn about the report and where to access it.
Rachel Perić:
You can find out more by visiting stateofwelcoming.org or by visiting welcomingamerica.org.
Carrie Fox:
Great. And we're going to have both of those links available for folks who are listening too. And then there are so many different questions burning, I'm sure, in people's minds about where this work is, where it goes, and how they opt into it. So for folks who are listening, if they are business leaders, if they're funders, if they are community members and thinking, I may or may not live in a certified welcoming community, but I want to advance this work, how can we?
Rachel Perić:
We talked about our certified welcoming communities? And then Welcoming America also has a network that extends across 47 states. And if you're a community-based organization or a local government, you can join our network to learn more about how to make your community a more welcoming place. We also run an incredible program called Welcoming Week, which happens in the middle part of September every year. And it's just a wonderful moment where all over the world people are celebrating in their communities and lifting up this value of being welcoming. And we would love for you to join us. It's a great opportunity for really any organization to host an event and partner with their community to put these values into action.
Carrie Fox:
Rachel, I'm going to ask if you've got some parting words to share with us as we wrap up today. Think back on these incredible 15 years, the work behind you, the work to come. What would you like to leave us with today?
Rachel Perić:
I think I'd like to leave us with a sense of possibility and hope. Really, so much of the challenge of polarization, of trying to move through this moment in history, I think is confronting hard truths and also finding a way through that leaves us hopeful and tenacious enough to fight. I think what the dominant narratives are, which are about scarcity and chaos in our world, and all of those things leave us fearful. And then more, I think, susceptible to being pit against one another.
Carrie Fox:
We started today talking about words and words matter. And it matters how the story of immigration gets told, right? It matters. Accurate descriptions and coverage of immigration and asylum and refugees experience matters because it doesn't just help us understand the experiences of others, but it helps pave the way for better policy, right?
So I think for everyone who's listening to this conversation, thinking about the work of Welcoming America and how you can plug into this work, recognize that you have a stake and you have responsibility to help us move this work forward too. So Rachel, thank you so much for inspiring us and for leading this important work, and we look forward to sharing this report with our community.
Rachel Perić:
Thank you so much, Carrie.
Carrie Fox:
And that brings us to the end of another episode of Mission Forward. If you like what you heard today, I hope you'll stop right now and give this show a five-star rating wherever you are listening to this podcast, maybe even forward it to a friend who you think would enjoy today's conversation. And of course, check out the show notes for all of the links in today's show.
Mission is produced with the support and wisdom of Pete Wright and the True Story Production team, as well as the wonderful Sadie Lockhart of Mission Partners. You can learn more about our work over at Missionforward.us, and of course, reach out to me anytime at Carrie@Mission.partners. Thanks for tuning in today, friend, and I'll see you next time.
