Throughout the past month, we checked in with our 2025 grantees to learn how their funded programs, projects, and initiatives are progressing – and to better understand the impact they’re making across Los Angeles. Now, we are excited to share these interviews, with stories of growth, challenges, and community transformation. [Find each of their stories here.]

Refugee Children Center received funding through the LA2050 Grants Challenge from the Goldhirsh Foundation to support its integrated model of legal services, culturally rooted programming, and holistic support for Indigenous and asylum-seeking families. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation with their team.

Interview Participant: Mayra Medina-Nuñez, Executive Director

LA2050: The Refugee Children Center provides a holistic model that combines legal services, support, and culturally rooted programming. How does integrating these services, particularly for Indigenous and asylum-seeking families, support both immediate and long-term healing?

Refugee Children Center: At Refugee Children Center, healing and justice are deeply connected. For the families served by our organization, many of whom are Indigenous and asylum-seeking, the challenges they face are legal, economic, emotional, and cultural all at once. Rather than treating those dimensions separately, our model brings them together in practice. That can look like women in the Guardianas del Jardín cohort tending ancestral crops while also completing immigration paperwork and setting aside stipend funds for their legal processes. It can look like cultural traditions, such as a Día de los Muertos altar, or Planting Day gathering, existing alongside Know Your Rights workshops and emergency preparedness sessions that help families plan for the possibility of detention.

For Indigenous and asylum-seeking families, we see cultural rootedness not as an added benefit, but as the foundation of healing. Coming together through ceremony, land, food, and seasonal traditions helps counter narratives of exclusion and affirms a sense of belonging and continuity. This integration of legal support, cultural affirmation, and community care is showing real impact, with the Guardianas del Jardín cohort reporting strong scores in hope, pride, connection, and agency. Those outcomes reflect a model in which immediate support and long-term healing are built together.

LA2050: Many of the families you serve face prolonged legal uncertainty alongside economic and emotional challenges. How are you navigating these barriers, and what early successes or shifts have you seen in supporting families toward stability and self-sufficiency?

Refugee Children Center: Prolonged legal uncertainty is one of the most difficult and corrosive challenges families face, not only because of moments of crisis, but because of the ongoing weight of instability and fear. In response, we work across multiple layers of that uncertainty at once. Economically, we designed the Guardianas stipend program so participants could set aside funds specifically for immigration-related costs, creating a direct link between community participation and legal self-determination. Legally, we have offered Know Your Rights presentations, one-on-one emergency preparedness sessions, G-28 form [Notice of Entry of Appearance as Attorney or Accredited Representative] completions, and childcare affidavits, all of which help move families from vulnerability toward greater preparedness.

One of the clearest early signs of progress came after the January 29 ICE raid on our campus, which forced the organization to suspend in-person programming. Even in that moment of disruption, members of the Guardianas cohort chose to keep coming to the garden. That choice was especially meaningful, because it reflected a shift from families simply receiving services to families feeling rooted in the space and community themselves. That sense of ownership, belonging, and preparedness is central to what we hope to build as it supports families through ongoing legal, economic, and emotional challenges.

LA2050: What do you hope to achieve in the last six months of the grant, and how can the broader LA2050 community support?

Refugee Children Center: In the second half of the grant, we plan to build on what we have learned by recruiting and launching a new Guardianas del Jardín cohort, bringing another group of women into its fellowship and garden stewardship model. We will also continue Know Your Rights and emergency preparedness programming, deepen garden-based entrepreneurship training, and expand the economic opportunities connected to the garden itself. By September, we expect to complete a full impact evaluation measuring legal, economic, and emotional outcomes across both cohorts, and in October it plans to host a community forum to share those findings and present a vision for scaling the model countywide.

Support from the broader LA2050 community can take several forms. We are seeking connections to schools, faith communities, and other groups that can visit the garden, since those visits help Guardianas imagine themselves as educators and stewards. We also hope to reach donors and supporters who understand that direct stipends are not just financial assistance, but a way to help women remain in this country and raise their children here. More broadly, we need advocates who are willing to stand publicly with immigrant families and affirm that they belong in Los Angeles and are part of shaping its future.

Photo Credit: Refugee Children Center