Housing Authority reaching out to non-English speakers

Chattanooga Housing Authority officials are establishing a list of CHA employees who are bilingual and will volunteer to assist non-English-speaking residents.

"We have an emerging Latino population and an emerging Burundian speaking population in Chattanooga, so we wanted to make sure that we could accommodate their needs," said Betsy McCright, CHA's executive director.

So far the authority has identified staff who speak Arabic, French, Hindi, Burundi, Russian, Spanish and Swahili.

Establishing a language access plan is part of an overall goal to better accommodate non-English-speaking residents, said Ms. McCright, who also speaks French.

CHA board members approved a policy to establish the so-called language bank at their monthly board meeting last week.

The policy comes a little more than one year after a Burundian woman was raped twice in her public housing apartment. The man arrested for the crime lived next door to her and wasn't taken into custody until five days after he allegedly committed the act because there was no translator to interpret for the woman. It was CHA residents who started to demand then that more services be in place to assist the refugees.

The language bank is a good program, but it took the housing agency a long time to do it, said Joe Clark, president of Boynton Terrace Apartments.

"It was the language barrier that was the problem a year ago when the lady got raped," he said. "The housing authority didn't have anybody to interpret for her, nor did the police department."

The language barrier may make non-English-speaking residents easy prey for criminals, said CHA board Chairman Eddie Holmes, but the language bank should help.

The policy also includes having CHA's director of resident services annually assess the language needs of housing residents. The resident services director also will determine if resources are available or needed to hire additional bilingual staff for interpretation services, officials said.

The Chattanooga community is becoming more diverse, Mr. Holmes said, and the housing authority needs to have a way to communicate.

"We advertise that we're an equal opportunity housing agency," he said. "We should have the ability to communicate with all people who need housing."

Bridge Refugee Services, a resettlement organization in Chattanooga, said it has placed about 100 residents in public housing sites or in CHA's Housing Choice Voucher Program since 2007. The residents are from the Ukraine, Burundi, Cuba, Liberia, Sudan and the Congo.

Most of them have come to the United States to escape persecution in their homeland because of their race, religion or affiliation with a political movement, Bridge officials said.

"When refugees arrive, they don't have anything other than the shirt on their back," said Marina Peshterianu, coordinator of Bridge Refugee Services. "I can't imagine doing what we're doing without the support of CHA.

"They extend hospitality to people in the most vulnerable situations in the world," she said. "It makes such a difference for people to go from being in a refugee camp to having their own apartment."