Her Migrant Hub
A Resource by and for Women Asylum Seekers
Founded in 2021 by Fordham GSS professors Dana Alonzo and Marciana Popescu, Her Migrant Hub is an initiative supported by a Mother Cabrini Health Foundation grant. Its mission: enhance access to vital healthcare resources for women asylum seekers in NYC. Its website empowers them with knowledge of their rights and connects them to accepting healthcare providers — all while preserving anonymity and providing a safe space to interact, learn, and build a community that centers the voices and experiences of women with a forced migration background.
Her Migrant Hub initiative is framed by a social determinants of health approach and anchored in the human rights paradigm. Learning processes are participatory, engaging women asylum seekers as the experts by experience, and establishing a dialogue between various stakeholders to improve policy and practice.
Alongside Alonzo, Popescu, and the women asylum seekers themselves, Fordham GSS students and alum help create and inform the website and initiative. Her Migrant Hub intentionally created and expanded a network of care, partnering across disciplines and engaging various organizations to provide these services and service providers in NYC. Other projects emerged from this initiative, focusing on training social workers as trauma-informed service providers working with people with lived experiences of forced migration (asylum seekers, refugees, or people with no clarified legal status).
Student Involvement with Her Migrant Hub
Each year, Her Migrant Hub recruits 8-12 M.S.W. students to work with the initiative. In return, students receive a $1,500 stipend alongside the invaluable learning process and experience gained working with and advocating for a more just migration process.
Students are selected based on their interest in forced migration, gender, and health/mental health; their ability to participate in all required project activities; and their prior experience and/or knowledge in any fields or topics related to our work. Proficiency in another language (preferably Spanish, French, or Russian) is a plus.
Selected students will be required to:
- Commit to a minimum of 10 hours per week for this project;
- Participate in a specialized course on forced migration;
- Participate in weekly HMH activities as assigned.
Summer engagement with the project is also greatly encouraged.
Students are strongly encouraged to complete their field placement requirement with one of Her Migrant Hub’s partner organizations while working on the initiative. These placements will focus on forced migration and mental health.