Last year saw the highest number of immigrants and asylees in United States history. More than 480-thousand people left their home countries for America.
NorCal Resist is a mutual aid organization that works in Yolo and Sacramento Counties. In the mutual aid model, community members help each other find solutions to problems. NorCal Resist organizes that community support.
The need, especially in California, is year round—but the holidays can really put a microscope on the situation.
NorCal Resist offers programs that directly impact a wide diversity of community members, including low income families, newly arrived asylum seekers, refugees, and other immigrants.
Founded in 2017, NorCal Resist has a number of monthly activities, based on the idea that community members have the resources, knowledge, and know-how to help keep one another safe, fed, housed, and healthy. With this ethos, NorCal Resist hosts a monthly auto light repair program that provides families with free light repairs to keep folks safe on the road and less likely to be subject to police stops, free food and diaper distributions, self help clinics that assist folks with work permits, asylum applications, immigration documents, know your rights events, and more.
We think it’s pretty special that all of these programs are led each month not by professional nonprofit staff or experts, but by regular community members, sometimes people who we first met when they came through our programs looking for assistance.
–NorCal Resist Team
Whether you’re a retired lawyer interested in helping at a self help clinic, a college student looking to earn some volunteer hours by helping at food distribution, or an educator interested in assisting at our weekly virtual ESL courses—we probably have a volunteer opportunity you can jump into.
While the work is fun and meaningful, the creation of relationships across all kinds of lines—age, religion, immigration status, race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, you name it—is pretty special, and is helping all of us to be part of a movement to create stronger neighborhoods.
You can learn more about our work, sign up for our email list, and check out our calendar all on our website at norcalresist.org. We’ve got trainings for our immigrant community on their rights when dealing with law enforcement coming up, as well as our annual holiday gift program, which collects toys for kids and gets those toys into the hands of newly arrived asylum seekers who may not otherwise have any toys at all.
We’d love to have you join our team and be part of a movement that shows we can take care of each other.
