As we close out the year, I wanted to share a quick list of 22 of our accomplishments in 2022.
- We invested in our facilities: a new paint job on the main building, new signs, four new bathrooms, and new flooring on the upstairs veranda and in the Literacy room. Our community room has beautiful freshly assembled dividers, desks, file cabinets and is ready for us to serve more clients.
- Over 1,600 people received a vaccine at FIRM this year
- We continue to host the longest running COVID-19 vaccination site in Fresno County. A few exceptional events include: 147 vaccines at our VA58 September event and 109 vaccines at our Christmas Photo Shoot event.
- We shared over 10,000 free rapid home tests with the community
- We welcomed over 200 Ukrainians to Fresno since March of 2022
- We helped over 50 people become citizens
- Our weekly and monthly in-language TV and radio programs were viewed over 20,000 times on Facebook and YouTube.
- We now have THREE HUD CERTIFIED HOUSING COUNSELORS who provided 768 hours of one-on-one housing counseling to 219 different clients.
- We hosted a delicious and beautiful Iftar event in April
- We helped four Cuban asylum seekers get the refugee benefits they are eligible for
- We awarded the Neng Thao Scholarship to Reanah Sang, a Khmer-American Central East graduate who attends UCLA.
- We celebrated World Refugee Day for the first time in June, complete with triple digit heat, dancing to dabke drums, Hmong dancers, Slavic songs, henna art, dozens of partner organizations, great raffle prizes, and three food trucks.
- We hosted almost 1000 attendees for our Halloween event, which included a housing counseling-themed haunted house, complete with useful information about the help we provide so you don’t have to be scared of evictions or foreclosures.
- We distributed 200 vegetable boxes from ABIRC with roughly a week of planning, after hosting 100 different people for a cooked Thanksgiving feast three days before.
- We picked our 1100 toys from Toys for Tots, recruited a dozen+ volunteers, wrapped every gift, and distributed them prepackaged by family, all in the span of four days.
- We invested in team building during our staff days: visiting the River Center, hiking to a waterfall, playing volleyball, learning Google Drive tricks, logic models, StrengthsFinder, DSS, forms, trauma and more.
- We successfully passed our first ever federal single audit without any findings
- We hired a full time internal Finance and Operations Director, Yaomee Xiong
- We’ve grown to be a $2 million dollar/year organization that ends the year comfortably in the black.
- We also welcomed to the team: Hafiz Ranjbar, Bee Lor, Chuya Moua and Tony Bounthapanya Jr. We welcomed Abeer Qasem and Julie Thao back to the FIRMunity!
- We were approved to start refugee resettlement in FY23 in partnership with ECDC USA, and found out about it while visiting ECDC in October.
- We marched in the 2022 Hmong New Year Parade as a team.
We trust in our FIRM foundation that we will meet the challenges that 2023 may bring with the strength, love, hope and joy that we cultivated this year. We always appreciate your encouraging notes, physical item donations and online gifts. Thank you for being part of the FIRMunity. ?????/Dyakuyu. Ua Tsaug. Shukran/????. Gracias. ?????/Kop Jai. ??????.