This week a client sent Just Neighbors a colorful card with a grinning cat on the front.  The card read:

“05/21/08  THANK YOU!!!  Dear Allison. Dear Karen.  I can’t tell you how much I was delighted when I receive your GOOD NEWS letter.  I am sure, had it been not with your help I wouldn’t have been able to get that invoice cancelled.  I would like to use this opportunity to express my heart felt appreciation!  God bless you, Your family, and Your organization.”

Dear Friends,

We are proud to announce that nineteen of our clients received their green cards this month!  Eighteen of them were refugees and one was an asylee; each is now on a track towards becoming a United States citizen, and each is very grateful.

Client Story

Over sixty percent of Just Neighbors’ clients are women, and they are usually mothers.  These mothers deal with the usual issues associated with poverty: housing, feeding their families, health care, transportation.  Because they have left their homelands, they often have an added dimension of hardship: separation from their children.  We do our best to help these splintered families get back together.

Just Neighbors has had the pleasant task in recent months to be the bearer of good news to some of our clients who are mothers.  Just Neighbors has been helping victims of domestic abuse secure temporary status in the United States with a “U visa”.  To be eligible for the immigration benefit, these women must have cooperated with law enforcement officials in the arrest or prosecution of their abuser.  For our typical client, the abuser is her husband or the father of her children.  Immigration recently issued “final” rules that apply to these women. The final rules offer these women a more permanent status.  This stability means they can bring the minor children that they left behind to join them in the United States.