Refugee Empowerment Program
Lynsee, Adult Education Coordinator at R.E.P.
LMS Intern Corey Jeffries sat down with Adult Education Coordinator Lynsee to discuss Refugee Empowerment Program’s (R.E.P.) mission and how they serve a unique population of adult learners in Memphis.
Tell us about your organization.
We're a community-centered support organization. We provide wraparound services for refugees and immigrants, and we serve mostly Memphis and the Mid-South area. But sometimes we go a little bit beyond those borders when the call comes in.
What programs do you offer to adult learners?
We offer aid for pretty much anything that you can think of. We help with housing, food, clothing, and other resettlement services like legal aid and language interpretation. We also offer after-school programming for children that are in K through 12 grades. We also offer adult education programming through ESL classes and civics test prep classes. We also do test prep for the high school equivalency exams and anything else that they would need for, like college or career planning for adults.
Why is your organization important to Memphis?
We serve a small and therefore often a very neglected or overlooked population. These are people who come here with nothing. They have no one. And we are that sort of liaison between their old life and their new life in the US. So we are important because if we didn't exist, they wouldn't be able to integrate.
Why is it important to offer life-long learning opportunities to adults as a community?
Learning is lifelong. It's one of those processes that you can just never escape from. That's the kind of mantra that I try to always instill in my high school students. And so we have to offer those opportunities to adults and especially the adults and the populations we are serving because a lot of our students didn't have access to formal education before they got here, and so if we're not providing that opportunity, then they would just never have the opportunity. And part of coming here is for better opportunities. So we want to help provide for them.
What have you appreciated about your partnership with Literacy Midsouth?
Well, it's something that we appreciate about all of our partnerships and it's that we get to build community and connections with other practitioners who have the same sort of goal which is to provide literacy services to not just Children but also the adults in this area. There is a large literacy gap and so it has been refreshing to work with another organization who has been focused on developing those literacy skills in our community.”
What is a common misconception you notice about adult learners that you wish you could dispel?
The stigma or misconception that I tend to find a lot in people who don't work directly with my students and this community is that the people who need adult services are lazy and or that they have a history of making poor choices, maybe perhaps in their youth or in their past that has prevented them from taking advantage of these opportunities. And that's simply not true in a lot of situations. It's more of a circumstantial reason that has kept them from education and less of a personal or individual choice. And none of my students are lazy. They all are the most hard-working and eager-to-learn people I've ever been blessed to work with.
Learn more about R.E.P. at repmemphis.org.
