Merna’s Projects
Featured
The new Word Travels project at the Namaste Garden in Tukwila, WA is part of the IRC New Roots program.
In autumn of 2018 Merna traveled to Europe to realize a longstanding goal of working with refugees in Berlin and Athens, two of Europe’s major hubs for immigration.
In 2019-2020, Merna and Foster High School ELL teacher, Carrie Stradley took a new direction for the Stories of Arrival Poetry project, with an ambitious poetry poster project. The creation of visual poems (broadsides) shows the deep humanity of each young person in the project.
The garden is an IRC New Roots Program for refugee gardeners which also has a focus on youth programs that support learning about food systems and sustainability from a social justice perspective.
As the project has grown, so too Merna’s commitment to nourishing community partnerships. In 2015 Merna established an intergenerational collaboration with Project Feast, an organization that serves refugee women that was located at the Tukwila Community Center and is now in Kent.
Founded by Merna in 2009, the Stories of Arrival: Refugee and Immigrant Youth Voices Poetry project takes place at Foster High School in Tukwila, WA, one of the most language and culturally diverse high schools in the U.S.