BuildaBridge Community Programs

It all began over a lunch meeting in November 2010.  Dr. Vivian Nix-Early, COO of BuildaBridge, Danielle Dembrosky, Programs Administrator at that time of BuildaBridge and Julieane Ramic of Nationalities Service Center (NSC) discussed the possibility of providing BuildaBridge Classroom art classes to young refugees newly arrived in Philadelphia.  NSC is a refugee and immigrant resettlement agency, serving almost 300 persons annually in Philadelphia.  Having identified the idea to address the mental health needs of newly arrived refugees, NSC and BuildaBridge joined two other refugee resettlement agencies and two other family health agencies that had also identified this same idea at the same time.  The idea to collaborate was born, leading all agencies to collectively write a grant proposal in January 2011 to the Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual DisAbility Services (DBH) for a project that would provide mental health resources to these communities....

by Sarah Rohrer BuildaBridge and Refugee Family Services (RFS) were waiting for the last act of their BuildaBridge Arts Week Celebration, and all eyes were on a smaller boy at the front of Class 4. Kay Do So projected a sense of serenity and calm as he stood with his back to the audience, facing his class, arms high and ready to begin conducting. No one had coached him to stand with such poise; it just came naturally over the course of the week as he became more knowledgeable about what sounds he wanted produced and how to bring them about. With a flick of the wrist, he signaled his classmates to begin. On the first day of arts camp, their music class had begun with introducing the heartbeat rhythm, but it quickly became a near free-for-all, as each student plucked, banged, and blew on instruments to their hearts’ content, with little regard for any guidance or instruction. While I knew how far the class had come since then, I was curious to see how well they listened to one another an...