Giulia Bonoldi, managing director of the Joel Nafuma Refugee Center, left, gives a tour on Sept. 17 to Janet Day-Strehlow, an Episcopal Migration Ministries Province II liaison, the Rev. Sarah Shipman, EMM’s director, center, and Max Niedzwiecki, who serves on The Episcopal Church’s Standing Commission on World Mission, as Holly Masterman, right, a JNRC volunteer, looks on. Photo: Lynette Wilson/Episcopal News Service
[Episcopal News Service – Rome, Italy] In an increasingly polarized world in which governments worldwide are decreasing funding and support for refugees and migrants, the Joel Nafuma Refugee Center here provides the kind of support that can be modeled throughout The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion.
Based at St. Paul’s Within the Walls Episcopal Church and named for its founder, the center is a ministry that dates to the 1980s; it takes a holistic approach to serving refugees and migrants, providing food and clothing, teaching them about their legal rights, preparing them for and helping them find jobs, and helping them integrate into society.
As Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe seeks to redirect the church’s resources to support diocesan and local ministries, the Joel Nafuma Refugee Center also provides a model for Episcopal Migration Ministries as it begins a new chapter.
“As EMM pivoted away from refugee resettlement, it has been ever more important for me to know the work of the church’s migration work,” the Rev. Sarah Shipman, EMM’s director, told Episcopal News Service during a Sept. 17 visit to the center. She added that the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe’s refugee grant program and, particularly, the JNRC are doing “amazing work.”
Shipman’s visit to the center followed a May visit by Rowe, who described the work that’s happening there as “tremendous.”
Shipman traveled to Europe by invitation to speak at an annual leadership training event sponsored by the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe happening in Geneva, Switzerland, Sept. 19-20. This year’s theme is “The Refugee Crisis: What we can do as parishes, missions and individuals.” Making a first stop in Rome to see firsthand the work of the JNRC made sense, Shipman said, as EMM shifts its focus from resettling refugees in the United States to supporting ministries serving refugees and migrants more broadly.
“I wanted to come to Rome and see the work of the JNRC so that we can figure out ways we can collaborate, and ways that EMM and the work that we’ve done for the last 40 years in refugee resettlement … might be able to offer support in some way,” Shipman said. “But until we knew exactly what the ministry here was, it’s hard to know what the needs might be.”
The center, housed in the crypt at St. Paul’s Within the Walls, operates a day shelter and provides food, clothing, Italian- and English-language classes, legal and job assistance, and other services to an average of 150 refugees each weekday. It does so with a small staff, interns and volunteers, and with a budget just under $400,000. Some 90% of its funds come from grants, which are increasingly competitive as governments redirect spending.
Still, what Shipman found, she said, was that the JNRC has been providing the outstanding services EMM and its affiliates used to provide to refugees when they were receiving federal funds in the United States.
EMM had been one of 10 nongovernmental agencies, many of them associated with religious denominations, that facilitated refugee resettlement through the federal program created in 1980. Refugees traditionally have been among the most thoroughly vetted of all immigrants and often waited for years overseas for their opportunity to start new lives in the United States. After the Trump administration issued an executive order in January suspending the program, EMM announced plans to wind down its core resettlement operations.
EMM continues to serve migrants through diocesan partnerships, collaboration with other Anglican provinces worldwide and local outreach to refugees who continue to build lives in U.S. communities.
Shipman was accompanied by Janet Day-Strehlow, an EMM Province II liaison, and Max Niedzwiecki, who serves on The Episcopal Church’s Standing Commission on World Mission, both of whom helped launch EMM’s Rainbow Initiative, which supports LGBTQ+ refugees and asylum-seekers.
In the European context, it’s particularly important that churches serving refugees and migrants coordinate with other local organizations and government entities so as not to duplicate efforts, but to add to them, Giulia Bonoldi, the JNRC’s managing director and convocation’s chief welcoming officer for refugees and migrants, told ENS.
This is particularly important as the European Union has for decades failed to find an adequate response to social problems, Bonoldi said. The church “needs to play its part, get out there,” and understand and find its place in the system and not try to do its own thing, outside the system, “which is sometimes a tendency.”
Throughout the convocation, and guided by Bonoldi, the church is trying. Building on its ministry to refugees and in response to the war in Ukraine, the convocation, with support from Episcopal Relief & Development, began accepting grant applications in 2022 from Episcopal, Anglican, and now other churches and missions across Europe interested in working with refugees and migrants. It has so far distributed over $1.5 million in support of local efforts.
EMM’s role, as Shipman sees it, is to support the work and to connect the people, parishes, dioceses and organizations that are providing direct services to migrants and refugees.
“Through our networks, we’re building relationships so that people have each other to call on. The migration issue is a global issue,” she said. “EMM is beginning to look beyond what’s happening in the U.S. and talk more about global migration with our partner Episcopal churches across the world, and also those in the Anglican Communion.”
-Lynette Wilson is a reporter and managing editor of Episcopal News Service. She can be reached at lwilson@episcopalchurch.org.