Fordham’s Initiative on Migrants, Migration and Human Dignity recently received a $670,000 grant from the Cummings Foundation, a Boston-based initiative promoting the concept of accompaniment. The money will allow them to expand their internship program and involve more Fordham students and faculty with the initiative.
The initiative was originally created in 2022 by Fordham’s Associate Professor of Spanish language and literature Carey Kasten, Associate Professor of theology James McCartin and Assistant Professor of theology Leo Guardado.
The program’s website lays out five main goals for the initiative: cultivating student activists and researchers, promoting the practice of accompaniment with migrant communities, supporting faculty and student research surrounding the topic of migration, cultivating relationships with community-based organizations and leading the promotion of migration accompaniment in Jesuit institutions.
Gregory T. Donovan, associate professor of communications and media studies and one of the professors working on the initiative, is the child of an Italian immigrant. He said that growing up hearing about his mother’s immigration story and now working on this initiative makes the work personal for him.
“This is an issue that not only I need to be focused on, but Fordham as a university, a Jesuit university in New York, needs to be engaged in,” Donovan said.
The Cummings Foundation initially provided the program with $200,000 in 2022. The original grant allowed the initiative to provide several students with paid internships and also allowed them to have two faculty members trained through the Villanova Interdisciplinary Immigration Studies Training for Advocates (VIISTA), an online training program that prepares individuals for accompaniment.
According to Kasten, this new round of funding, which started in January and will last three years, will primarily be used to help the initiative expand its internship program. Some of the funding will also be used to allow more students and faculty to get trained by the VIISTA program.
“We sponsor all different kinds of interactions and conversations, and we’re just really starting to sponsor intentional conversations with communities in New York City,” Kasten said.
One of the main goals of the initiative is to connect students with internships through the organizations that they partner with. These organizations include the Little Sisters of Assumption (LSA) Family and Health Services, The Ark at the Congregation Beit Simchat Torah (CBST), Jesuit Refugee Service, Kino Border Initiative and more. Currently, they have eight interns placed at LSA Family and Health Services working directly with migrant populations.
Lauryn Sweeney, FCRH ’25, held an internship at the Catholic Charities Refugee Resettlement Department through the initiative during the summer of 2024. During the internship, Sweeney primarily worked on case organizing and migrant intake interviews. She said the experience was very eye-opening but also very overwhelming.
“Obviously it’s one thing to learn about it and another to experience it,” Sweeney said. “I am very hopeful in the way that there are such dedicated individuals there who have been there for so long that do the service. But it’s also overwhelming because there is such a lack of resources.”
Aside from connecting students with nearby internships, the initiative sends students to the border between the U.S. and Mexico every summer to help people immigrating to the United States. Clare Balsan, FCRH ’24, was among those to spend eight weeks at the border in the summer of 2023. During her time there, she worked in the kitchen and clothing post while also doing intake interviews for migrants coming through the border.
Balsan said it was emotionally challenging to hear people’s stories, but it was also one of the most impactful experiences of her life.
“It was a very, very impactful experience for me. Probably one of the most impactful of my life,” Balsan said. “Emotionally, it was very challenging. I met a lot of people who were fleeing such incredibly difficult and tragic and horrendous situations in their home communities.”
In September, the initiative will host an on-campus conference to bring together organizations, faculty and students from Fordham and other universities to discuss migration-related issues.
In the meantime, the initiative hopes to continue engaging students with the topic of migration and providing internships for students through partner organizations.
