The Urban Village

About the Organization:

The Urban Village’s mission is to accompany continuing generations of Knyaw (Karen) and Karenni youth to connect, heal, and launch. Our programming is co-constructed with our youth to help them explore their own cultural heritage, history, and connection to their ancestral homelands, embrace their intersectional identities, and nurture them to become future leaders beyond our village.

The Issue:

The issue we’re facing is a growing chemical dependency crisis among the youth of the Karen and Karenni diaspora. But if you’re willing to go deeper with us, the real issue we’re addressing is what lies under the layers of chemical addiction. We see disenfranchisement within a slanted education system, disconnection from culture, hurt from social and societal structures, and the challenge of navigating intersectional identities as refugee youth as core contributors to the increase of opioids and gang violence in our community.

In understanding this issue, context is important. Our community fled the oppressive and violent occupying forces of our ancestral homelands into refugee camps where scarcity disrupted any hope for security, only to finally be resettled into a new context where violence, poverty, and insecurity remain, only now in new and foreign forms. This reality has impacted both our parents and youth, but each in unique, different, and sometimes compounding ways.

An estimated 25,000 refugees from Burma (Myanmar) live in Minnesota. This includes the largest Knyaw (Karen) diaspora community anywhere outside of SE Asia. While our community has shown incredible resilience in displacement and resettlement, many among it face long-term mental and emotional stress due to multiple severe pre-migration traumas (Schweitzer, Brough, Vromans, & Asic-Kobe, 2010). Compounding these traumas are the stressors of life in the U.S. related to poverty, neighborhood safety, cultural adjustment, discrimination, separation from traditional support networks, and worry about loved ones still in Burma can increase distress. Throughout all these challenges, family and community have been among the greatest sources of strength, support, and mutual aid. However, research on refugee resettlement has revealed that family conflict is one of the greatest post-resettlement concerns for Knyaw (Karen) refugees (Schweitzer et al., 2010; Simmelink McCleary, 2016).

The Solution:

Preventative programs: Knyaw Camp/Knyaw Club
- Knyaw Camp is a summer immersion experience centered on creating safe space for Knyaw youth to explore and engage the intersection of their identity. This is done in both large group and break out group settings. While at Knyaw camp, we eat traditional Knyaw meals, play games from the villages and refugee camps, share experiences, and allow everyone to embrace and embody what being Knyaw means to them through creative expression. This camp doesn’t create individualized healing plans, rather it allows each participant to come as they are, share their truths, and experience belonging. Last year, every willing camper shared an “I AM” poem that they were prompted to create. The exhibition of spoken word was not only profound in delivery, but in the sense of community, empathy, and solidarity it created amongst the entire group. This summer, over 100 Knyaw youth have signed up representing Knyaw communities of six different states, and Canada. When Knyaw Camp ends, those who live proximate to the Urban Village are welcomed and encouraged to join in Knyaw Club, our twice a week after school version of Knyaw camp that continually and creatively allows opportunity for cultural rootedness and identity engagement.
Interventional programs: Asian Youth Outreach (AYO)
- AYO is a culturally relevant 1-1 mentorship program. Youth referred from the county, schools, or clinics are paired with a trained Knyaw or Karenni mentor. The mentors and mentees meet weekly and group activities are planned bi weekly. Our AYO mentors are also engaged in addressing the disparities in services for Karen and Karenni youth within the clinic and corrections systems. Mentors also create preventative resources and are a bridge to other helpful local programs.

Manisha G. Bewtra, AICP

Planning, Mobility, and Development Advisor to Tucson Mayor Regina Romero

Manisha Bewtra, AICP (she/her) is Mayor Romero’s Planning, Mobility, and Development Advisor. In this role, she leverages her passion for planning for thriving, healthy, and inclusive communities with her love for policy-making and politics as the Mayor’s liaison on transportation and land use issues. Manisha is an experienced public process facilitator and project manager and works collaboratively with the Mayor’s team and city departments to apply an equity lens to all city initiatives.
Manisha has built her career on bringing divergent perspectives together, facilitating conversations around change, and generating data-informed solutions that move communities forward. She is driven by public service and champions equitable policies and inclusive community engagement.
Prior to her current role, she worked at the Metropolitan Area Planning Council in Boston as a senior regional planner and the manager of the analytics team, at the Massachusetts Housing Partnership where she was a statewide technical assistance provider, as an adjunct city planning instructor for Master’s degree program courses at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and at Arizona State University, and in municipal government and nonprofit community development organizations in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Chandler, Arizona.
Manisha has served on various equity-focused organizations and committees and is a graduate of Emerge Massachusetts, the Initiative for Diversity in Civic Leadership, and the Massachusetts Commonwealth Seminar, three organizations dedicated to training underrepresented groups to influence public policy and to run for office. She has a Master of City Planning degree from the University of Pennsylvania, a BA in Economics and Art from The University of Iowa, and is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners. She currently serves as a member at large for the American Planning Association Arizona Southern Section and is a member of the executive team for the Asian American and Political Islander Caucus for the Arizona Democratic Party.
Before moving to Tucson in the summer of 2020, she lived in the Boston area for twelve years. During her years in Melrose, Massachusetts, she served as a Human Rights Commissioner and subsequently as a City Councilor. When elected to the Melrose City Council, she became the first person of color ever to serve in elected office in Melrose. She grew up in Iowa and identifies as Desi/Indian-American. She, her husband, and her son felt welcomed and right at home in Tucson when they moved here – even in spite of a pandemic and searing summer heat.

Arnie Saiki

research, writer, program director

Broadly focusing on regional economic and geopolitical themes in the Asia and Pacific regions, Arnie Saiki is currently leading a working group on data, statistics and valuation in the Pacific. His book “Economic and Ecological Accounting: Towards Intemerate Values,” was published last year by the Pacific Conference of Churches, the Pacific Theological College and the University of the South Pacific.

Since the publication, this campaign has been introduced to the Ecological and Economic Justice program at the World Council of Churches and he is participating in a G8 Interfaith forum for the inclusion of Wellbeing indicators into our economic accounts.

While national statistics and ecological accounting normally fall under the purview of government, academic or international institutions, Arnie has been campaigning in democratizing our ecological data, seeking support for a proof-of-concept accounting program that would enable poor, impacted, and indigenous peoples to actively participate in how we account for our socio and economic biodiversity. Intemerate Accounting is an equation that helps to correct accounting disparities that have, to a large extent, excluded the Global South. Revising our accounting system can provide access and opportunities that cross wide campaign sectors, bringing hope, action and efficacy to reverse climate change, restore our ecological biodiversity, and redistribute global wealth more equitably.

Arnie has been actively promoting and working on global justice campaigns since 2007 when he received a “We the People” grant from the Hawai’i Council of the Humanities for his work on Hawai’i Statehood. He has organized conferences with Hawaiian national independence groups, managed the Save Rapanui campaign after the Chilean military forced a lockdown of Easter Islanders. Arnie spoke at the World Bank representing the Pacific Island Forum, and participated in discussions around regionalism in the Pacific. He was recently appointed the US-Pacific Diplomacy and Solidarity Mission for the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), and is on the management team of the Deep Seabed Mining Campaign.

In 2011, Arnie received the blessing from Dr. Kekuni Blaisdell to organize a counter-conference in Honolulu while APEC was there and coordinated the Moana Nui conferences, an international partnership between the International Forum on Globalization and Pua Mohala I Ka Po. For the last ten years he has been campaigning on issues around trade, development, ecological resources, indigenous issues and militarization in the Pacific.

His essays, “TPP at the End of the Line: a briefing on economic cooperation and capacity building” was published in American Quarterly by John Hopkins University Press, and “Manifesting the Liquid Continent,” was published by Yunnan National University, as part of the 1st International conference on Asia and Pacific Ethnology and Anthropology.