Jiran means neighbors in Arabic, and Jiran: The Arabic Community Action Summer is a Middlebury summer program that connects Arabic-speaking students with recently arrived Arabic-speaking refugee and immigrant families in Connecticut for a summer of mutual linguistic and cultural education. This program includes multiple workshops, events, and resource offerings meant to build bridges between the recently arrived families and their new local community while also providing student participants with intensive Arabic-language classes, and an experiential curriculum about various topics related to forced migration and immigration.

The centerpiece of the program is its pairing structure, through which each Arabic student works one-on-one with a recently-arrived Arabic-speaking family to help them achieve a set of logistical, bureaucratic, and social/cultural goals that the student-family pair sets together at the beginning of the summer. Jiran's focus is bridging the interpersonal gaps left by organizations that support these families while also providing an intensive service-learning and linguistic learning experience for college students. Jiran is fundraising to cover program costs that allow the program to provide free and accessible programming to recently arrived families across Connecticut.

Please contribute what you can to support Jiran as it harnesses the indefatigable energy of Arabic students to help soften the landing of families struggling to get acclimated after arriving in the US