Application Period Now Open for Prestigious 2012 E Pluribus Unum Prizes Program Honoring Exceptional Immigrant Integration Initiatives

WASHINGTON — The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) on Wednesday announced that the application period for its 2012 E Pluribus Unum Prizes, a national awards program that annually honors exceptional immigrant integration initiatives, is open and runs through 5 p.m. ET on March 15, 2012.

Details on the 2012 E Pluribus Unum Prizes application process can be found at: www.integrationawards.org.

Applications for three $50,000 prizes and a Corporate Leadership Award are sought from non-profit and community organizations, businesses, religious groups, government entities and individuals who are taking part in ou tstanding efforts that help immigrants and their children join the mainstream of U.S. society or that bring immigrants and the native born together to build stronger, more cohesive communities.

The prizes program, now in its fourth year, is administered by MPI’s National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy with generous support from the J.M. Kaplan Fund. Every year, hundreds of organizations and individuals from across the United States that engage in a wide variety of immigrant integration work – whether resettling refugees, offering English or citizenship classes, providing workplace training, financial literacy classes and myriad other programs – apply to the E Pluribus Unum Prizes program.

“We established the E Pluribus Unum Prizes to encourage the adoption of effective integration practices and to inspire others to take on the important work of integrating immigrants and their children so they can become full participants in U.S. society,” said Margie McHugh, co-director of the National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy.

“While the ultimate success of immigration policy turns on how well immigrants integrate into their new communities, workplaces and classrooms, this important work happens all too often with scant attention from policymakers, the public and other key stakeholders,” McHugh added.

The 2011 E Pluribus Unum Prize winners, celebrated at an event in Washington, D.C. in May 2011 attended by senior executive-branch officials and other national leaders, were honored by the White House as “Champions of Change.”

The 2011 winners included a Hispanic economic development initiative in Kansas City that helps immigrant entrepreneurs while also revitalizing once-languishing urban areas (Hispanic Economic Development Corporation of Kansas City); a refugee resettlement agency with innovative business, literacy, urban farming and other resettlement initiatives in San Diego (International Rescue Committee in San Diego); a Philadelphia-based organization with affiliates across U.S. college campuses that match student volunteers with immigrant elders (Project SHINE); and a San Francisco-based program with centers in nine cities that helps foreign-trained professionals rejoin the health care field at their skill level (the Welcome Back Initiative). The Corporate Leadership Award was given to the Marriott International Global Language Learning Initiative.

For more on the E Pluribus Unum Prizes program, visit www.integrationawards.org.

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The National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy is a project of the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), an independent, non-partisan, non-profit think tank in Washington, DC dedicated to analysis of the movement of people worldwide. The Center is a crossroads for elected officials, researchers, state and local agency managers, grassroots leaders and activists, local service providers and others who seek to understand and respond to the challenges and opportunities today’s high rates of immigration create in local communities. For more on the Center’s work, visit www.migrationpolicy.org/integration.