City Heights is home to San Diego’s immigrant and refugee communities. But over the last decade, it has been rapidly gentrifying and families, small business and nonprofit groups are being pushed out and a huge loss for community power and cultural preservation. Like so many members of our community, PANA is committed to overcoming displacement and cultural erasure. Over the last eight years, we looked for a place to be able to provide a village of sorts with a resource hub, gathering space for civic and social groups, and multigenerational affordable housing units for our members. Thanks to our generous funders, we were able to purchase 2.2 acres of land in the heart of the Mid-City Community in 2023 to build out our new project: the Refugee Immigrant and Cultural Hub (RICH).
In order to make this village come to life, PANA has engaged in an 18-month community visioning process, grounded in the following values: abundance, collaboration, transparency, responsiveness, and collective thriving. PANA created an Advisory Committee composed of a group of stakeholders who represent a cross-section of the refugee communities and grassroots organizations. We also invited community members and Ethnic Community Benefit Organizations to join a series of visioning sessions, facilitated by a team of development experts and facilitation consultants, on how to best use and steward RICH to make it sustainable, accountable and responsive to the community’s evolving needs. By staying rooted in community, supporting durable and sustainable community-led solutions, and committing to powerbuilding and racial justice, RICH is an experiment and evolution of what it means to have a village.
RICH is a first of its kind effort that is addressing a number of complex issues within the diverse refugee and immigrant communities, so having a values-driven process is critical to ensure this project is a success. It takes great courage for people to start over in a new country and even greater courage to decide to build something different that honors our dignity and well-being. As people who fled, were expelled, or exiled from our homelands, we honor with gratitude, Indigenous Peoples past and present, who have stewarded this place through generations. We grounded our vision process in the Seventh Generation Principle, which comes from the philosophy of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (Iroquois). The Seventh Generation Principle speaks to the connection and interdependence of those who have gone before us and those who are yet to come, with those in the present day as a bridge. We also appreciate our Advisory Committee for lending their time and talents to making RICH a reality - (Ahmad Bailony, Carl Crider, John Loughlin, Jonathan Mehta Stein, Maryan Osman, Mohamed Mbenge, Muna Shegow, Ramla Sahid, and Taha Hassane), and our facilitation team, Chingwell Mutombu, Rufaro Gwarada and David Schrayer, for setting the stage for us all to work together towards a common goal- building a better nation of neighbors, starting right here in San Diego.
