Hello friend,

TIRRC is officially 20 years old! What started as a small group of community leaders has blossomed into a powerful movement of immigrants and refugees working to build a Tennessee where we all belong. Celebrate with us by contributing to our 20th anniversary giving campaign today.

I’ve been at TIRRC for 17 of our 20 powerful years, having joined in 2006, just three years after the organization was founded. Immigrant communities around the country were rising up in protest against a harmful federal immigration bill, and Tennessee was no exception. In my second week at TIRRC, we mobilized over 10,000 people to join together to march and speak out against these harmful provisions in the House of Representatives. This is how the movement for immigrant rights in Tennessee was born, and I'm proud to have been part of building our power ever since.

Over the last 20 years, we've seen time and time again how community organizing creates transformative change, yet there is still work to do to reach every immigrant community in the state. With your support, we will expand resources to immigrant and refugee youth and workers at the forefront of social justice movements, and we will develop the skills of young leaders and adult workers to build the capacity of the organizing field in Tennessee. 

Will you make a gift to help us continue building the Tennessee we imagine, one where every immigrant and refugee in the state has the tools to organize and improve their community?  We are raising $50,000 to celebrate our 20th anniversary, and we need your support to build a strong foundation for the next 20 years.

To meet today’s challenges, our communities will need to build an unprecedented level of power capable of both sustaining a long-term vision and addressing daily attacks on immigration and voting rights, and to combat issues facing our community such as gun violence, climate change, and more. This sort of power won’t come easily. It will require community organizers to come together in the thousands to build coalitions, develop alliances, and elevate public narratives that promote our vision of social justice and true democracy. And with your support, I know we will be successful.

 

To a better Tennessee,

Leticia Alvarez, Senior Programs Director