Special Board of Aldermen Meeting Page 3
March 21, 2016
with the youth at the high schools during the summer and this is an opportunity where middle schools and high
schools are together and we had a great opportunity of exploring what leadership meant to them and how they
felt about their community. Many of them had projects for their own particular school. It’s amazing to see the
progress that these teens have been able to do for their school. Some were able to advocate for multi-
language dictionaries in their school in a very short period of time. Their schools probably have over $500.00
in dictionaries that they didn’t have at the beginning of the year. Moving forward | think we will continue with
the schools doing a welcoming nights for parents and also for the youth. Another thing is to reach out to the
afterschool programs in the Nashua area; we have all of the participants like the Boys and Girls Club, Girls,
Inc, YMCA, the Nashua Prevention Coalition; anyone who is identifying themselves as working with youth.
Ms. Fitzgerald
I'd like to talk to you about the navigator, Cultural Navigator is actually the title that this group started with and
this program is actually modelled after a program that the Hartford Public Library started four years ago to be a
partner in Hartford’s grappling with the growing immigrant population and how to make them feel more
integrated. In Hartford in particular the library has the American Place so it’s a little bit more than the Navigator
Program but we took that and we adopted it and made it more special to Nashua. The Navigators are a group
of community volunteers and they are trained to be friendly neighbors and mentors to immigrants and refugees
in our city. Their particular role is not to be a social worker but a friendly face to give them advice and help
them engage more fully in their community. The library and the Adult Learning Center have formed a
partnership and the Adult Learning Center is posting the coordinator position for our Navigators and the library
is hosting a series of welcome events that will be run by our Navigators. The first events topic is Emergency
Services so we are inviting folks from the fire department and the police department and talk a little bit about
when it is appropriate to call emergency services and what to expect to happen when you do that. We
recruited our first group of Navigators in September of last and we had over 30 people volunteer and 18 of
them were from another country and represented 14 other languages that were spoken. They were joined by
13 volunteers that were long-time Nashua residents. We had a Navigator who volunteered and she had only
been in the country for a few months, she didn’t drive and she didn’t have a job. One of the other Navigator
volunteers showed her how to use the bus and helped her find the courage to apply for a job at a place where
she had already applied once, she got a job and now she is employee of the month. It’s fantastic to see a
group of volunteers become friends and become a support for one another. We see this program as a way to
person by person change our city and make it a more welcoming place. Our Navigators are not trained to do
tasks for someone but to help them find the courage and the daring to help them figure out how to do it for
themselves. | like to think about it as our Navigators helping immigrants learn what the expectations and
possibilities of their new home are.
Ms. Tracy Hatch, President and CEO of the Greater Nashua Chamber of Commerce
| am not here tonight representing the Chamber, | am here as the co-chair, along with Galina Szakacs; we are
the two co-chairs of the Business and Civic Leadership Goal Group for One Greater Nashua. Most people the
Chamber is all about economic development and a skilled workforce and that’s true but what leads to that are
leaders, the people in our community who step forward like all of you have on the Board of Aldermen to take a
role in shaping our community. We need to make sure that when we look to leaders of the future that we are
not just looking to those of us who are traditional Nashuans. We want to look into some of the areas within
Nashua that aren't traditional Nashuans and we want to engage and support them. When you think about how
many of us got our start in leadership positions we followed some fairly traditional paths. We joined Rotary,
and exchange club or the Lion’s Club or became members of the Chamber of Commerce. Yet for the
newcomers or those who may have had several generations here in Nashua but don’t come from our white
bread background, that’s not necessarily the normal way that they connect and as we look for leaders in the
future, we need to be very cognizant of that. We need to not only open the doors to those more traditional
places like the Rotary and the Chamber of Commerce but we also need to see where are those leaders, that
18%, those youth leaders that Jared pointed to and Janeth pointed to, where are they connecting today?
Where are their parents connecting because it’s probably not where you and | connect today? We need to find
