QUESTION
What are the roles and responsibilities of the Mayor's Office for Immigrant Affairs (MOIA)?
0:25:46
·
128 sec
The Mayor's Office for Immigrant Affairs (MOIA) focuses on serving immigrant populations with various programs, especially immigration legal services, language access, and English learning.
- MOIA has a limited scope but collaborates with other agencies, including DSS and DYCD, on immigration legal services.
- The office plays a key role in language access, growing its team from 3 to 20 to enhance services.
- MOIA provides technical assistance and champions language access across city government.
- It offers a unique English learning program emphasizing conversational English and civic participation, in partnership with community organizations and libraries.
Alexa Avilés
0:25:46
Can you walk us through Moia's role and responsibility?
Manuel Castro
0:25:51
Thank you, Teravelis, for the question.
0:25:54
So Moya has a limited scope in terms of our role in responsibility with respect to serve in immigrant populations.
0:26:02
As I described, we oversee a number of different programs, in particular, our immigration legal programs, but it's important to point out that multiple agencies, including DSS and DEYCD manage their own immigration legal programs.
0:26:23
They are not required to include us in their in their work.
0:26:30
Although we often support and promote their work, we specifically focus on the programs that we laid out.
0:26:39
I also described in my testimony our work around language access, which is highly collaborative with other agencies because we collect and report on language access plans.
0:26:52
And as I described that I been able to grow the team from 3 when I first took office to now 20, which was a major priority of ours.
0:27:02
And something really to highlight about Moiad.
0:27:06
We offer technical assistance and support to those agencies that need it.
0:27:13
And we often serve as the champions for language access in city government.
0:27:20
I also describe our work around English learning, which, again, other agencies manage English learning programs, but our specific program that we oversee looks to provide very practical English learning courses.
0:27:38
With an emphasis on conversational English and also to educate immigrant communities, on city services, and engage them in civic participation.
0:27:50
We do this in partnership with CEOs and libraries and other institutions.