Fresno Interdenominational Refugee Ministries Inc. (FIRM)
Rev. Sharon Stanley, Partner Director
Rev. Bounkham Nounvilaythong, Partner Director
1603 E. Shields Ave.
Fresno, Calif. 93704
(209) 227-1388
(209) 227-1154 fax

Fresno, urban center of California’s rich agricultural Central Valley, is a city of 600,000 people, and fully 60,000 of them are refugees, most of those from Southeastern Asia. “It’s a tithe,” Rev. Sharon Stanley says with a smile, alluding to the potential political impact of such a sizable minority. “And we know how much a tithe can be worth.”

Fresno’s minorities -- the refugees and many thousands more immigrants, documented and otherwise, including the valley’s vast body of Latino farm workers -- are large in numbers, and deep in poverty. The overall unemployment rate in Fresno County is a whopping 16 percent, but in one apartment complex populated heavily by Southeast Asians, it rises to an appalling 85 percent; the unemployment rate for the refugee community overall is 65 percent, almost two out of three. Fully 92 percent of refugees live below the poverty line, and a total of 39 percent of ALL the children in Fresno live in poverty. It’s no surprise, then, that the effects of poverty are widespread: Although Fresno’s sprouting downtown, with its fancy new convention center and startling modernistic City Hall, and the suburban vistas of its green-lawn neighborhoods make the city look prosperous by the standard of urban areas in the eastern U.S., its employment, poverty and frightening crime statistics tell another story; so does the chilling reality that 25 youth gangs prowl the city’s urban neighborhoods alone.

But for the 25 Asian gangs, Stanley says, there are 25 Southeast Asian churches, too; and it’s into that context that FIRM was formed in 1994. Stanley, a young Presbyterian minister who fell in love with Asia when she worked in Korea before coming to California, and a coalition of other clergy including both Asians and Anglos, came together in the face of Fresno’s growing poverty to seek solutions and find ways that they could all work together to fill gaps and find new approaches to attack neighborhood problems that members of the community would define. As a membership organization, FIRM’s board of directors is drawn from member churches, and by agreement must represent at least 51 percent Asian churches; its staff and programs, too -- including the executive director’s post -- are set up in partnership, with Asians and Anglos working side by side.

Operating from a one-story office building in a commercial Fresno neighborhood, FIRM has a full-time staff of three, plus three part-time employees and, during the summer, a dozen workers in its Summer Youth Project. Its lean budget is only $175,000, of which the $75,000 in the partner directors’ salaries is covered by their respective denominations.

The rest, pulled together from a variety of funding sources, is used for specific, targeted programs addressing needs identified by the member congregations. Three such programs are currently under way: