 On Saturday, April 13th, Project Fazia gathered various community organizations at the East End Community School in Portland to connect people to services they may not know about. Project Fazia is a non-profit organization that helps African refugees and immigrants become part of the community they are living in by helping them find jobs and become acclimated to a different culture. Lynn Davis, Outreach Coordinator for Learning Works, describes what that organization has to offer. We are just presenting a bunch of our programs. We have a multitude of programs, some that specifically impact refugee and immigrant populations. We have an English language program that teaches English as a second language. And we're working on developing some workshops for smaller groups so they can work on filling out job applications and sort of gaining some of those interviewing skills and things like that. We have programs for youth that have behavioral issues, so it's really case management, it's for the family. So if, for instance, a youth is involved with the law and the family needs sort of help connecting them to services and advocating for them, case management may be something that they can utilize that we offer. So we're just here, we've got all our brochures and we're just in case anybody is interested, we're willing to sort of educate them on what is in their community. I'm here with the League of Women Voters because we want to encourage the people here to, if they're not already registered to vote, we are here to encourage them to register to vote. We can tell them about the process of registering to vote and explaining to them why it's important to do that and for them to be able to vote, they need to register. Otherwise they'll be unable to participate in one of the most important things that we have, which is the power to vote. My international sister is a new organization for girls to learn about each other's cultures. Jennifer Sovett talks about why she is a member of the organization. I'm a member because I think people should be able to come and be in a group about religion and really talk about what you guys do in your culture and really learn about other people's cultures and help the community. I was born and made by my parents who are originally from Southern Sudan. I really like the celebrations because we all come together as one even though we're from different tribes. We all come together and we celebrate July 9th, which is the independence of Southern Sudan. So we come together and we dance. We have a Pacific culture dance for each tribe and different food from each culture. It's really fun to see people and try to see new people from the same tribe as you that you've never seen before. We're looking for girls and a culture. We don't really care where you came from but we're looking for girls from ages 12 to 14. Yeah, 11 to 14. That will be committed to the group and really help us to bring out the culture and be really fun with us and helpful with the community. The Portland Police Department was invited by the Bazear Project to join in this community event. We have a couple of community programs that we're trying to advertise to all community members. We've got the Yellow Dot program and child safety car safety seats. The Yellow Dot is important because for a language like if they're in an accident they're able to, the Yellow Dot on the back will tell them where the information is for all their health and their name and where they live. So this is the third or fourth community event that the Police Department has sponsored in this particular format trying to get the word out to the community members and realize that with the immigrant and refugee populations and our minority populations they don't tend to show up at general public events. So this event focused just on them and provide information and also gives us an opportunity to meet people not in unison. So we're not in uniform, we have less intimidation in that regard. I'm here to educate folks in this community about the importance of life insurance, disability insurance, auto insurance, home insurance, renters insurance, those types of things. Most important I think is knowing that they have the ability to ask questions and that we're there to provide the answers that they need because if you don't feel comfortable asking the important questions you're not going to have the information you need to make important decisions for your family. The event was free and food from other countries was provided. This was the second such event for Project Bazear which plans to continue to offer these events every two months. The next one will be in June.