Nonprofit Spotlight: Americana Community Center

By: Clare Rutz, Director of Development at Americana Community Center, Inc.

Americana Community Center is a local nonprofit that helps refugee, immigrant, and low-income residents of Louisville integrate into society through educational programs and counseling so they may be healthy, happy, and productive citizens.  

With a small staff, we rely on the community for their gracious support to provide these resources to over 5,000 refugee and immigrant participants. As Louisville remains a welcoming city to refugees, we understand it is essential to continue to provide support after the resettlement process so we are working to become even more sustainable and effective.  
This is where you come in.  

Americana remains committed to making sure that almost all of our funding goes straight to our programs and participants so we don’t have a huge development team. It’s actually a person and a half (part-time, that is). We also understand that in order to thrive rather than merely survive, we’ll need the community’s support. The first step is to make sure the community knows that we exist. 
 
This will be the first order of business for the Americana Ambassadors. Or maybe the second. The first step will have to be putting a team together. 

We’re looking for ten people who want to help refugee and immigrants in the community in a meaningful way. We’ll talk about how to get the community involved through events or a conversation. There will be a little marketing, event planning, social justice-ing, and everything in between. Come with some experience or none at all, but ready to contribute. We’ll be meeting once a month and I will do everything in my power to make sure these gatherings aren’t a drag. The Ambassadors will be like a smaller, in-the-field board of directors that won’t be tied to expected donations, bylaws or wealthy connections. There will also be many opportunities to meet and work with our board. 

Please submit this ever-so-brief application before February 22nd. If you have any questions, feel free to send me an email at clare@americanacc.org.