Graduate School
Harvard School of Public Health

Undergraduate School
College of Medicine, University of Nigeria

Mentor
Usra Ghazi, Harvard Divinity School and Former Rappaport Policy Fellow

Agency
City of Boston, Mayor’s Office for Immigrant Advancement

Supervisor
Celina Barrios-Millner, Office of New Bostonians

Description of Fellowship
Emeka’s fellowship involved working with the Boston Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Advancement on its Immigrant Integration and Empowerment Project. The overarching goal of the project was to create and replicate successful practices in welcoming and empowering immigrants to fully participate in the social, economic, and civic life of the City. Towards this goal, therefore, he worked to conduct a research on the best practices on immigrant integration. Based on this research, he was able to develop immigrant integration measurement indicators for the City of Boston. Using these indicators, then, he developed an immigrant integration survey and evaluation instrument for community conversation with immigrant populations in different Neighborhoods of Boston. With these questionnaires, the Office of Immigrant Advancement was able to conduct a survey for community leaders of different immigrant serving organizations in Boston. The aim of these surveys was to help identify gaps and disparities in how the City of Boston serve the immigrant communities and also to give the communities an opportunity to weigh in on the best approaches to immigrant integration and empowerment. At the same time, he helped in the design, development and implementation of another survey tool for community members in different Boston Neighborhoods. The findings from both of these surveys formed the basis for the policy recommendations to the Mayor of Boston on immigrant integration. The overall goal was to establish a process through which city leadership both embraces and encourages the full engagement of immigrants in the power dynamic.