We maintain a direct service volunteer program for those interested in a higher level of involvement, either in direct partnership with asylum seekers through mentorship, English language partnership, or special project volunteering, or by supporting asylum seekers indirectly through social services projects.
We are currently recruiting for high needs skills on a rolling basis, and we conduct regular onboarding and recruitment cycles in the late spring and fall. Our high need skills are as follows:
New York
Spanish proficiency and a desire to work with Spanish-speaking clients to improve their English
Dari, Pashto, Russian, Ukrainian, and/or Amharic language skills
Washington, DC
Spanish proficiency and a desire to work with Spanish-speaking clients to improve their English
Dari, Pashto, Russian, Ukrainian, Arabic, and/or Amharic language skills
If you possess a high need skill, please get in touch with our team!
In this monthly program, volunteers write letters of compassion and solidarity to people in immigration detention and participate in a short learning session that reflects on issues facing refugees and asylum seekers. Participants must be 18 or older. All letters will be sent and received by HIAS to protect privacy. Letter Writing is a remote program held on Zoom. You can find learning portions, or brief educational videos related to detention in the US and topical immigration issues, as well as more information about detention in the US at the bottom of this page. To register for letter writing in the DC area, click here. To register for letter writing in the NYC area, click here.
Note: We are unable to accommodate participants in this program from outside the Greater Washington, DC or New York City areas. This program is for individual participants and not groups – for information on limited group volunteering experiences with HIAS, please contact DCvolunteer@hias.org or NYCvolunteer@hias.org.
Volunteers are currently working on walkthrough and resource guides to expand asylum seekers’ access to critical resources and awareness of important challenges that they will navigate in the US. We are currently not recruiting volunteers for additional work on our resource guides, and will update this page according to our need.
In partnership with Americans for Immigrant Justice, volunteers are supporting families who have recently arrived to the US through the southern border and have been placed in expedited removal proceedings in the NYC & DC metro areas through transportation assistance, partnership, and childcare. Spanish proficiency is preferred for volunteers interested in supporting the FERM Program. If you’d like to learn more about our FERM support program, please email Lilly.Sandberg@hias.org.
Coming soon!
Volunteer Program staff member Cyan Jackson leads a learning portion about the recent Senate supplemental funding bill. This video was recorded as part of the HIAS Volunteer Program’s Letter Writing program on Monday, February 12, 2024.
A conversation about new research into migration narratives with the National Immigration Forum, Migration Policy Institute (MPI), Metropolitan Group and RAND.
In “Migration Narratives in Northern Central America: How competing stories about emigration and immigration in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador shape regional policy,” authors Natalia Banulescu-Bogdan and Ariel G. Ruiz Soto of MPI, and Aaron Clark-Ginsberg of RAND, analyze how migration narratives since 2018 have engendered pride and loyalty, fear and shame, hope and despair — as well as how different actors may leverage them to justify policy approaches or incentivize mobility decisions.
For one teenager who fled violence in El Salvador on his own in 2014, the days he spent in a Texas border detention center were some of the worst of his life. He tells us what it was like.
Photographer documents immigration and life inside detention facility, PBS