Organizing Migrant Communities to Realize Rights

Domenic Vitiello, Professor of City Planning and Urban Studies at the Weitzman School of Design, announced the launch of the Organizing Diasporas to Realize Rights website. Published in English and Italian, the website provides a summary on Professor Vitiello’s research with immigrant communities entering Europe through Palermo, Italy and the network of organizations that support migrant community rights.

Professor Vitiello notes that Palermo, Sicily, has been a leading center of migrant rights advocacy and civic participation in the twenty-first century. With support from Penn Global’s Global Engagement Fund, his project team engaged an existing network of diverse migrant community associations and other partners in Palermo to take stock of migrant rights and support systems in the city. The partner organizations, research assistants, and cultural mediators from different communities designed and conducted a survey and interviews to document experiences, issues, and opportunities related to important migrant rights, such as asylum, housing, work, health care, food, education, and more.

From these efforts, Professor Vitiello and colleagues created a web resource that summarizes their research, provides recommendations for city officials, regional authorities, and other civil society actors, and serves as an information tool that catalogues Palmero’s civil society network and services. The last phase of their project involves community outreach and organizing to strengthen immigrant/diaspora community rights networks and their important advocacy and service work.