Pan African Association and Northeastern Illinois University Partner
On Friday, at the Pan African Association main office, 6163 N. Broadway St., the Pan African Association (PAA) and Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) held a special memorandum signing ceremony marking the establishment an official partnership between the two entities.
“The Pan-African Association feels privileged to be signing this memorandum of understanding with Northeastern Illinois University,” said A. Patrick Augustin, Executive Director of the Pan-African Association. ”Such valuable community partnerships make us stronger, and provide us with opportunities to better serve our refugee and immigrant clients.”
Northeastern Illinois University is a fully accredited public university serving 11,000 full and part-time undergraduate and graduate students in the Chicago metropolitan area. NEIU engages its diverse campus community in a rich environment of learning, teaching and scholarship.
“Pan African is just a perfect choice since our faculty has worked with the association and our students have done internships here,” said Dr. Sharon K. Hahs, President of Northeastern Illinois University. “We are thrilled to more formalize a relationship that has been there for a while. I think it’s those special people reaching out to each other is how this all began.”
PAA board member, Hussein Affey, a former refugee from Somali before settling in Chicago for the last 30 years, believes that this partnership is a great sign for things to come for PAA.
“[This partnership] means a lot because it opens the door for Pan African Association to work with an institution like Notheastern Illinois University which has been in the community for many years,” said Affey. “This will help Pan Africa to put its foot in the City of Chicago and be a partner with different agencies and universities, so we must start with this one first.”
As part of the partnership agreement, PAA and NEIU’s together will provide accessible, quality, and affordable educational opportunities to their surrounding communities.
The partnership is especially important for Northeastern as it prepares for a fall 2014 opening of its new El Centro Campus in Chicago’s Avondale neighborhood at 3390 N. Avondale Ave. The new campus will accommodate and provide educational resources for PAA members including assisting them with becoming computer literate as well assisting them with learning English.
“Our mission is to empower local refugees, exiles and immigrants,” said Andrea Porter, Pan African Association Volunteer Coordinator. “What we do is provide them services for when they enter the work force and we also provide them with skills to be able to thrive in the work force. We do a lot of English language training, integration services to get them used to life in Chicago and we also do a lot of job readiness training like, going on interviews, how to dress in the work place, how to behave in the work place. It’s more about entering into the work place and becoming self-sustainable.”
For more information about Northeastern Illinois University visit http://www.neiu.edu/Home/index.html. For more information about the Pan-African Association visit http://www.panafricanassociation.org/ and https://www.facebook.com/panafricanassociation.
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