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Show The majority of family mentors expressed how difficult it was to develop a communicative relationship with their refugee families. Case managers feel that many mentors fail to deal with the language barrier altogether, and therefore are limited in what service they can render the family (CMFG). Many case managers also lack confidence that family mentors can communicate with their families on a level to where mentors would be able to see progress and/or barriers with which the families are dealing. However, case managers feel that there are benefits to the language barriers as well. For example, the families, especially the women who for the majority of the time remain in the home, are able to have exposure to English. Leaming English is obviously very important to the process for refugee families. While case managers have every right to be concerned that this is in fact a challenging issue for the Family Mentor Program, it seems as though family mentors are finding ways in which to work through this barrier (FGs, 11). With the exception of one, all of the family mentors with whom I spoke said that they were able to get to a point where they felt they were able to communicate with their families. One family mentor commented, "Within the first month we felt comfortable working through dialogue together" (FG 1). 5.1.2.6 Family mentors feel that refugee families are comfortable expressing their needs to them. Many said that after the first month, s/he did not even have to come up with activities to do with the families because all the time was spent fulfilling the requests for their needs. One example of this was a family mentor who said, "When I first started, I felt like I had to have an activity every time that I went over to their house and that is how I started off doing it. After a while though, I would show up and they would say something like, we need to go to Target or we need to go find a cell phone. Often times they would have stufffor me to do when I got there, like helping them fill out forms and it got to the point where there was a little bit less pressure. But once in every four or five weeks, I would plan something and have a few friends to come a long but, pretty quickly my family felt very comfortable letting me know what their needs were and that is what began to fill up our time" (FG2). 5.1.2.7 IRC has not established the need for consistent, regular feedback from mentors regarding volunteer hours, refugee families, and/or the Family Mentor Program. As a result, the majority of family mentors do not communicate regularly with IRC Staff. Family mentors do not know what information IRC needs from them other than what the activity log states, which includes: volunteer hours and activities that mentors do with their families. However, the majority of the family mentors with whom I spoke have never seen this activity log nor have they turned in their volunteer hours beyond the first month. The reason why is because IRC does not solicit the information on a regular basis (FGs, Is). One family mentor answered, "Sometimes I would do it maybe, sometimes I have a hard time just filling out the hours sheet. And it would be frustrating to fill out a survey and never hear back anything from it. I would rather !RC just not even try unless I was confident that they were going to follow through and give me the help that I ask them for" (FG2). 18 of 18 |
