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Hartford Public Library's The American Place (TAP) is a sustained program of services for Hartford's ethnically diverse and immigrant populations.  Since its inception in the year 2000, TAP has formed dynamic partnerships with immigrant service providers, local nonprofits, city, state and federal governmental agencies, and providers of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) to better serve and aid clients.  Staff are knowledgeable about issues important to clients; passport services, the VISA Lottery, citizenship, and attaining English language skills are all core components of TAP.

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In July, 2005, TAP Coordinator Homa Naficy began an ambitious project utilizing $20,000 in LSTA funding in an effort to position the library as a bridge institution for refugees resettled in Hartford.

The grant partners with the Catholic Charities' Migration and Refugee Services Program, which provides resettlement services with an eye toward helping clients become accultured to and self-sufficient in the United States. 

Most of the current refugees arrive in Hartford from Bosnia, the Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the former Soviet Union; these are people formerly persecuted in their native lands because of political or religious beliefs, or who have come to America due to warfare or a national disaster like famine.

One might think that the story ends with everyone touching down on American soil and living happily ever after, but the reality is that these individuals and families, while now 'safe,' have been uprooted from their homes, lives, and cultures to a place that is quite alien to them.  While these folks are free to go about attaining the American dream, they have few tools with which to do so; their literacy skills are generally low, even in their native languages.  Their job skills most likely offer nothing to prospective employers; they arrive in a new world with what they can carry in their hands, heads, and hearts.

Naficy's LSTA grant helps these individuals gain language with a core collection of basic-level English as a Second Language (ESOL) material.  It also takes into account the severe effects of political trauma often experienced by refugees by including programming that addresses the turmoil and isolation they feel. 

On October 19th, a group of twenty refugees toured the Hartford Public Library; the tour was most probably this group's first exposure to a governmental agency that welcomes them to the United States, which actively seeks them out in order to help them.

Another goal of the program is that targets will grow to experience the library as an important - and uniquely 'American' - resource for self-learning, for their children's learning and development, for recreational purposes, and also for social purposes.  The library will become a non-threatening space for interacting with each other and with the larger community.  Of her new charges, Naficy says, "It is amazing for me to see such collegiality and kindness of spirit amongst a community that has suffered so much. They are always smiling."

 
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