FREEDOM HOUSE
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Mission Statement
Support and empower people seeking humanitarian protection, especially asylum seekers and refugees, on their journey to safety, security, and freedom by providing comprehensive services in an inclusive and welcoming space.
About This Cause
Freedom House Detroit is a temporary home and lifetime community for people from across the globe who are fleeing persecution and seeking humanitarian protection. Over our nearly 40 year history, we have remained Michigan’s only full-service provider for persons seeking humanitarian protection, providing community-housing, legal aid, access to medical and mental health care, and acculturative-employment and -housing literacy training. Services are delivered using a trauma-informed, interdisciplinary approach. At Freedom House Detroit, thousands of people have found refuge and asylum. Founded in 1983, Freedom House Detroit is a temporary home and lifetime community for indigent survivors of persecution from around the world who are seeking humanitarian protection. Because of their political, religious, or sexual identities, Freedom House’s clients were targeted, often violently, by their home countries’ governments or groups their governments would not or could not control. By definition, our clients cannot return home. But the perilous and heart-wrenching decision to leave behind their homes, families, and livelihoods brings a new set of life-threatening problems. In the US, they are cut off from the support of family and friends, ineligible for mainstream benefits and employment, and isolated by their dissimilar languages and cultures. As an international border, Detroit has always been a destination and waystation for people fleeing persecution and torture. Freedom House’s founding was a community response to Salvadorans who had made the dangerous 3,000-mile trek from El Salvador to Detroit to escape their country’s bloody and violent civil war. They brought with them haunting stories of torture, disappearance, and death. Despite its prominence as a border city, in 1983, Detroit did not have a service network for those seeking humanitarian protection. Then, as now, mainstream homeless and social services providers did not keep immigration lawyers on staff. They were not accustomed to working with many clients of different cultures and languages. And they lacked networks for supporting individuals who were ineligible for employment and safety net benefits (such as Medicaid and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families). Rising to meet these challenges, social service providers, churches, and individual citizens on both sides of the Detroit-Windsor border began to respond. They managed to mine their own networks and cobble together refuge, food, legal aid, medical care, and transportation. But to truly be effective, they would have to build a completely new network of services designed solely for those in need of humanitarian protection. These activists became the Detroit/Windsor Refugee Coalition, later renamed Freedom House Detroit. Today, nearly four decades later, Freedom House is a wholly American institution firmly planted in Detroit, with deep roots extending into Canada. Since its founding, Freedom House’s experience, reputation, and client-diversity have grown. Today, it remains Michigan’s only full-service provider for persons seeking humanitarian protection. On a typical night, over 50 people call Freedom House home (over 120 people annually). They are individual men and women and families from every corner of the globe, including Africa, Asia (West/Middle East, South, and East), Europe, the Caribbean, Central America, and North and South Americas.