Sokhom Tauch is the Executive Director of the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization (IRCO), an agency that assists refugees, immigrants, and multi-ethnic communities to develop self-sufficiency and cultural awareness while affirming and preserving each culture within an ever-changing environment.
Before becoming executive director, he was IRCO’s fiscal manager for over 15 years. Under his leadership, IRCO has expanded its services in many areas including youth services, senior services, community development, folk arts, domestic violence services, citizenship, environmental justice, and volunteer programming. In 2001, Tauch worked with the IRCO staff and board to purchase its own building and community center for the Portland refugee and immigrant community.

Tauch has worked in refugee resettlement since coming to the United States. He has provided numerous fiscal management workshops to refugee self-help organizations in Oregon, Texas, and Florida.

Tauch is active in the Cambodian community both locally and nationally and helped the Oregon Cambodian community to find financing to build a traditional Buddhist temple. The temple, like those in Cambodia, has become the center for Oregon’s Cambodian community.

In his own words, he tells the story of his journey from Cambodia to his current leadership role.
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Leaving Cambodia

I came as a refugee from Cambodia in 1975. At the time, there was no such organization like IRCO. Refugees like me have to do everything on our own, with the help of the assistance from our sponsor.

I left Cambodia on April 17, 1975. I served on the Cambodian Navy. I didn’t know much about politics at the time, and didn’t even want to escape. We took a ship out – a transport ship. It was too slow, we were afraid the Khmer Rouge will catch us. We happened to come across a bigger Cambodian ship and joined them. I thought we were just going to be away for a couple of days, and if things calm down, we’ll come back in. The Khmer Rouger sent a message that they’ll kill us all if we came back.

The Malaysian government wouldn’t let us in. They didn’t know of the situation in Cambodia. We stayed on the ship form April 17 to May 1. We finally communicated with the U.S. embassy in Kuala Lumpur. They sent a helicopter. After talking to our commander, they told us to go to Subic Bay.

On May 31, we were shipped to a military camp in Pennsylvania. We were prohibited from getting near the fence, because they were afraid that we will try to escape. After three months, I got a sponsor in Portland.

When I came to the Portland airport, I sat on the floor waiting for my sponsor. When my sponsor came, he brought with him a Vietnamese who can speak French. Because I too can speak French, we were able to communicate.

Life in Portland

I’m one of first Cambodians in Portland. I came to the IndoChina Center, which offered support for Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian refugees. I got my first job there.

Back then, Asians have a lot of problems looking for vegetables, because there are not as many grocery stores. I didn’t even know where Chinatown was. But if you wanted rice, you go to Chinatown.

When I finally figured out where Chinatown was, I took the bus. I bought a 25-pound sack of rice. The bus refused to board me. The driver was afraid that if I put the bag of rice down, it could create an accident. I carried that sack of rice on my shoulder, crossed the steel bridge, and came to I-84. I stuck with the bus route and followed the freeway. If I deviate, I will only get lost. I carried the sack of rice about 10 miles. To me, as a young man, it was nothing. I thought, we used to walk further than that in Cambodia.

I did all kinds of jobs: dishwasher, janitor, busboy. When Oregon Employment Services sent me to a busboy job, I misunderstood what it meant. I thought it was about working in a bus and collecting people’s fare. I was excited because I thought I was going to do a lot of sightseeing in Portland. But they sent me to a restaurant where I cleaned the tables. It was a lot of work, but it was a job.
I was very flexible about the jobs I had. I made the most out of every situation. That’s the way I still am now.

Working for the Community

In 1977, I started my first job at IRCO. They needed a Cambodian translator to do typing, immigration adjustment status, because the refugee status is temporary. Refugees have to apply for permanent status to stay in the U.S., and a lot of people have trouble understanding the process.

I had an education in bookkeeping from Northwestern College of Business. My former boss asked me if I wanted to be a bookkeeper.

After all these years, I’m still doing the same job.

Sokhom Tauch with instructors and students at an English language class offered at IRCO. The agency empowers refugee communities, families, and individuals so they can become self-sufficient and contributing members of U.S. society.

Back then, we only had eight people working at IRCO. If something needs to be done, one of us has to do it. We didn’t care about job titles, we just wanted to get the job done. Our work was about the community, not about one’s self.

Community is my big thing. IRCO started out serving refugees from southeast Asia, but it has evolved to help a lot of different communities. We serve different ethnic groups, languages, cultures – we all work together here. We are trying to build one immigrant and refugee community. It doesn’t matter where you come from. Each one is encouraged to preserve traditions, if we come together, we’ll be a bigger voice.

Many newcomers are difficult to work with. They don’t speak language, or come from cultures with no written language. I remember when we placed a group of women to work in a hotel. That afternoon, the owner of the hotel called to tell us they didn’t have any clean rooms. The women couldn’t read the numbers, so didn’t clean the right rooms.

We established a literacy class to work with people and teach them how to read and write in English. When I first came here, everytime I went on the bus, I had to save my address in my shirt pocket. I didn’t know where to stop, or how to stop the bus.

Now, we have mass transit training with TriMet. Have a bus that drives new arrivals around town: show

them how to put the money, how to stop the bus.

A New Start for IRCO

When I took on the leadership role at IRCO, we had operated at a loss for four years in a row. We were losing about $60,000 to $100,000 per year. Right away, I knew that my first job was to find the hole in the pot – why are we losing money? We were able to stop all the leaks, and turned the agency around financially in about a year.

Financial control is critical. If there’s a problem with programs, it takes a few years for an organization to get in trouble. But money problems take only months to bring an organization down. People won’t trust you if you mishandle money. If people don’t trust you, you can’t establish relationships. It would be hard to raise money and get grants. You can’t have services unless you have donors.

By 1999, we started a capital campaign to buy a building. We felt that it was the best move into the right direction. Just like a family that owns a house, you and your children become stable in a neighborhood. It was the same for IRCO. Because we have a building for our services, people now view us as a more stable organization. There’s more accountability.

We started fund-raising. Former clients who now have jobs donated $5 to $10. They worked for minimum wage, and that’s the best way they can give back.

The different community groups also helped: the Hmongs, Laotians, and Vietnamese communities. Our staff began working the concession stands at the Rose Quarter. As a nonprofit, our staff volunteered to serve hotdogs at events, usually after work. We raised money that way.

We took all that we raised and approached the Meyer Trust. We showed them that the community wants to buy the building for IRCO. They gave us $400,000 in grant money. Smaller foundations soon followed and we raised more money.

We were able to raise $2 million – a good-enough downpayment for our new home.

We moved here in 2001, a few weeks before 9/11. The community didn’t understand who we were. People complained about parking and driving. We didn’t look like the mainstream, so at first, they saw that as a negative to the community.

We went to community groups to raise awareness about IRCO. We wanted for people to understand that we are good people, that we help the community. After they got to know us, they became more accepting.

Lessons learned

I used to be a Buddhist monk before I was in the military. Being a Buddhist monk is a Cambodian tradition for young men. We learn how to be a good man, to know right from wrong, to truly care for other people.

I practice servant leadership. Characteristically, I don’t order people to do something. It’s a little contradictory to Western management style. I believe that if you do the work, then you inspire others to join you.

Our people are our biggest asset here at IRCO. We don’t have enough money to pay our staff for all the work they do. They volunteer their time to work extra hours, to go the extra mile. They truly respect and believe in what we do for the community.

Our staff have strong relationships within their own communities. They come to work during the day, and in the evening they go back and serve their community.

Looking ahead

I can’t get away from the community. At my age, I should be looking for place to retire, but now I have a new idea: low-income housing for seniors.

New immigrants that come as seniors don’t speak the language. They can’t even understand what’s on TV. They end up babysitting their grandchildren, and they get bored. Our senior program brings them here twice a week to have lunch, exercise, and attend workshops on Medicare, nutrition, and how to take care of themselves.

We have dances here too. Asian, African, Russian seniors dance together with one music. You feel differently when you see them all dance together, enjoying themselves.

We want to look at low-income housing for seniors. We’ll do research about how to connect services to housing.
Summer 2007

Children clamor around the silver, bulbous machine that generates low-level electric charges. As their hair stands on end and little aluminum pie plates fly off their hands, they say, over and over again, “It’s magic!”

Like the Wizard of Oz, Anna Rudnitskaya, a pixieish 16-year-old with a red OMSI polo shirt, stands at the on-off switch of the machine in the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry’s demonstration room. In a soothing voice tinged with a Ukrainian accent, she explains the science behind the “magic” Van de Graaff generator.

“Electricity is going through you and trying to get out” through hair or fingertips, she says.

For Rudnitskaya, who wants to study medicine in college, volunteering at the museum is a dream job. She is part of OMSI’s Rising Stars youth volunteer program. She is also part of a new push by the program to collaborate with groups such as the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization to recruit minority and immigrant students.

“We’d like this volunteer program to help OMSI reach out to underserved populations,” said Kyrie Thompson, the youth volunteer coordinator. She started approaching organizations that serve diverse populations when she started the job a year ago. It’s an investment into the museum’s future in a changing region, she said.

“If someone knows a young person from their community or who speaks their language is here, they will be more likely to visit.”

From IRCO’s perspective, the OMSI program is a perfect tie-in to its grant-funded Young Women’s Equity Program, which aims to steer Slavic and African girls to careers in science and technology.

In Russia and Ukraine, gender equity in science careers and education is not drastically different from gender equity in the United States, said Margarita Vejo, an academic career counselor at IRCO who works with Slavic youths. However, Oregon’s immigrant population is largely composed of evangelical Christian refugees who, because of their traditional values, may steer girls away from high-intensity careers.

“We hope girls will become more curious about science and might be inspired to take deeper science courses,” Vejo said. “This is a chance to put theory into practice and to meet people and be more outgoing.”

This summer, four of about 70 Rising Star volunteers are students from IRCO’s Young Women’s Equity Program. Two are from Ukraine (including Rudnitskaya), and the other two are from Ethiopia and Somalia.

For a lot of minority youths, “there are all these barriers” to joining the Rising Stars program, Thompson said. “A lot of families don’t even know about OMSI. Some don’t have transportation or aren’t familiar with the application process or can’t cover the cost of the program.”

Thompson said the partnership is symbiotic because IRCO provides their volunteers with job-skills training before starting at OMSI and the museum offers scholarships to cover the $250 cost of joining the volunteer program. That cost covers their training, an overnight stay in the museum, a family membership to the museum and extras such as the uniform shirt and food.

To underscore the importance of multicultural, multilingual volunteers, Thompson cites a recent example: Once, a student volunteer from a Korean immigrant family encountered a school group that was visiting from South Korea. She performed a science demonstration entirely in Korean.

“They were totally excited and amazed,” Thompson said.

Rudnitskaya, who grew up in Eastern Ukraine and came to Portland with her family when she was 10, said she had been to OMSI only once before she became a volunteer.

“I really like it,” she said. “I never even thought you could volunteer in a prestigious place like this.”

Between IRCO and OMSI, she said, having so many people invested in her future career makes her feel as if a career in medicine could be in her reach. Now she’s also considering physics because her time in OMSI’s physics lab has piqued her interest.

“I’m thinking about more fields, rather than just being a secretary or something,” she said. “To work here at an age like this encourages me in the future.”

ANGIE CHUANG
The Oregonian Staff

Angie Chuang: 503-221-8219; angiechuang@news.oregonian.com

Asian gangs focus less on violence, more on lucrative crime
Monday, July 09, 2007
ANGIE CHUANG
The Oregonian Staff

Asian gangs have faded from Portland’s spotlight since the 1990s, when beatings and shootings routinely highlighted violent rivalries of a generation whose refugee parents were scarred by war.

Now run by a younger crop of savvier youths, the underground organizations are stronger than ever, gang-prevention experts at the Asian Family Center say — less violent, smarter, more high-tech but just as destructive to young people.

Ly Duong, 18, knows this firsthand. He’s seen the friends and acquaintances who suddenly got respect, invitations to parties and money — lots of money — when they joined.

But he’s seen the dark side, his peers ruined by drug addiction, with multiple arrest warrants and no future. So the Franklin High School senior has made up his mind.

“They watch ‘Godfather’ and ‘Scarface’ and think they’re going to get rich or die trying,” Duong says. “Get a job, man.”

Duong has become a spokesman of sorts for the Asian Family Center’s youth programs, particularly its gang-prevention efforts. He understands the local gang scene but is also a gang-prevention success story.

Colleen Kim, who heads the center’s Youth Gang Prevention Services Program, says Duong is unusual because he sought out and embraced help. She recalls that he approached her a couple of years ago and said, “Hey, keep me out. Check in on me.”

For him and the approximately 100 other youths each year who get case managers through the program, the goal is to forge a relationship with someone who is neither a parent nor a gang recruiter. Kim says they get young men and women involved in sports, tutoring, jobs, community activities — whatever it takes.

“It’s something to use their time and energy,” she says. “And to gain their trust.”

The Asian Family Center, run by the Northeast Portland-based Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization, has offered programs for gang-involved youth since the 1980s. Back then, officials of the immigrant community organization say, the problem was highly visible.

A wave of disaffected youth who had been out of place in schools — alienated by post-Vietnam hostility, and a system unprepared for the large numbers of refugees who came in the late 1970s — formed gangs for a sense of belonging and protection. Often, Vietnamese American children had fathers who were in re-education camps or were killed during the war.

As that generation passed through the school system, many dropping out, ending up incarcerated or even killed, the Asian gang problem seemed to fade. High-profile beatings, fights and shootings became less frequent.

Lt. Mike Leeloff of the Portland Police Bureau says the gang enforcement team has focused its limited resources on growing Latino and African American gang activities over time.

“Asian gangs were more street-level and showing their colors throughout the ’90s,” he says. “They’re there now; they’ve become a nonfocused group.”

But Kim says subsequent generations of gang members just changed tactics.

Better adjusted to U.S. culture than their predecessors, these youths, mostly Southeast Asian, organized to form crime rings. They used technology to stay low-profile, making money from identity theft and dealing marijuana or ecstasy. Some gang members have gotten involved in underage human sex trafficking and larger-scale drug deals, she says.

“You don’t necessarily see a high percentage of API (Asian Pacific Islander) kids in the prison system, and street crime appears to have gone down,” Kim says.

“But I think gangs have gotten progressively worse. The networks have become more sophisticated, more difficult to detect.”

Leeloff says the gang team focuses on what he calls “street-corner livability” crimes such as shootings, robbery and assaults. It’s difficult to quantify with police statistics what Asian Family Center staff members have observed.

However, he agrees that it’s a mistake to view Asian gangs as a problem of the past. “They are still around. You just don’t hear about them.”

“In it for the money”

In Duong’s eyes, the shift is simple. In the past, Asian American youths didn’t fit in at school, got beat up and wanted to feel protected. Now, “a lot of these gang members are actually really popular at school. They’re in it for the money.”

County and city grants pay for 21/2 staff positions at the Asian Family Center; the prevention program is in the second of a three-year cycle. It focuses on at-risk youth with no criminal records. A separate program helps gang-affected youth who are in the court system, Kim says. She acknowledges the programs can’t reach hardened gang members or compete with the sway of gangs: “We can’t coerce anyone.” But young people such as Duong are their best outreach tools, and the center has a respected reputation in the community after more than two decades of anti-gang work.

Duong says he stuck with the program because of the staff.

“They are the realest people in the world,” he says. “You can tell them anything. They have also experienced the things that we’re going through. They’ve been through rough times themselves.”

Angie Chuang: 503-221-8219; angiechuang@news.oregonian.com

African community leaders credit Asian leadership for success of Africa House

By Maileen Hamto

More than 100 people gathered at the opening ceremony of a refugee service center for Africans who are newcomers to Portland.
The realization of a longtime dream of community leaders and volunteers, Africa House Refugee Center is the latest accomplishment of the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization (IRCO).

In recent years, the African population in the Portland metro area has grown considerably. More than 20,000 Africans from 25 different countries now make Portland their home.
Africa House is a multilingual community-based center that provides African refugees family-focused access to services, such as job training, health education, referral for social and support services, family intervention and leadership workshops, community engagement, and more.

Asian community leaders were among those celebrating the grand opening of Africa House. Organizers say Africa House follows the same model that has worked well for IRCO’s Asian Family Center, established in 1989 to serve refugees from Southeast Asian countries. The first family center of its kind in Multnomah County, the Asian Family Center was specifically designed to meet the unique cultural and language needs of Asian Pacific Islander youth and families.

“I find the Asian community as part of my family, because of the similar struggles we have,” said Karifa Koroma, chairman of Africa House’s 16-person advisory board. As a college student in the 1970s, he moved from Sierra Leone to Oregon, and has since been a strong advocate for the African immigrant community. “(Southeast) Asians and Africans have the refugee issue in common. Now that we’re in a new country, we’re trying to help each other.”

IRCO Executive Director Sokhom Tauch, who came to this country as a refugee from Cambodia in 1975, is pleased with the opportunity to work alongside leaders of the African community to share lessons learned from the struggles of the early immigrants from Southeast Asia. “Being united is the best thing to be in this country.”

The diversity of the African refugee and immigrant community posed some early challenges in pulling together a cohesive community effort. In time, community leaders put their differences aside to work toward a common goal: to build a community service center that serves the diverse needs of African refugees and families.

Koroma was successful in ensuring that the advisory board represented diverse leadership from various African communities. “It took us a long time to get here, but the journey was worth it. Now, Africans are able to come together as a strong community — under one roof — speaking with one voice,” he said.

Funded by a three-year $200,000 grant from the federal Office of Refugee Settlement, Africa House seeks to provide culturally specific services to African refugee families.

The center has a team of trained multilingual staff and volunteers who are dedicated to helping individuals and families become successful and self-sufficient, says Djimet Dogo, program coordinator, originally from Chad.

“It’s our responsibility to help refugees integrate into American culture, to their new life in the United States. We help with everything from life skills and employment training, to referrals to medical services,” said Dogo. “We help new refugees go to the DMV or register their kids to school. If there’s a problem at school, we mediate and help parents understand how the school system works.”

Currently in the Montavilla neighborhood, Africa House is in a leased facility owned by a former Iraqi refugee, Wally Matthew. “It was hard for us to find a place,” said Dogo, who is grateful for Matthew’s generosity. Matthew reportedly rents the facility to IRCO for less than market value.

Contributing to the success of the community center is one good turn for Duke Tran, IRCO board president, who emigrated from Vietnam with his family in the 1990s. He is credited by the African leadership for being one of the driving forces behind the establishment of Africa House.

“It’s a great accomplishment for the African community. It was wonderful to work with people who really wanted to make this happen. Now, our city has a one-stop resource center for African refugees and immigrants,” he said.

Africa House Refugee Center is located at 8535 S.E. Stark Street in Portland. To learn more, call (503) 802-0082 or visit www.irco.org.

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