Shapiro Family’s Foundation Shifts its Work From Helping Americans to Helping Refugees

By partnering with George Soros…..

***Update*** Breitbart reporter John Binder reported just yesterday that Shapiro is helping move illegal aliens into the US interior too.

 

In 2016, with the big push to resettle tens of thousands of Syrian refugees in America, the Shapiro Foundation patriarch Ed Shapiro got the idea to increase the number of refugees that resettlement contractors were bringing into the US by pushing for an expansion of the government-run refugee resettlement model used in the US to a system similar to Canada’s.

Canada has a government program and in addition allows for private groups to sponsor refugees outside of the government program.

Now I might argue for private sponsorship if that was how our entire system was run, with no taxpayer funding permitted, purely private money for private charity.  But this “new era,” as they are calling it, is simply to make more places available for third world refugees.

Here is what Shapiro says of his work.

By the way, family foundations are a way for very wealthy people to shelter their wealth from taxes, but still use it for pet (often political!) projects.

We are Ed & Barbara Shapiro, and along with our two young-adult children, we make up The Shapiro Family. Our philanthropic work through the Foundation is an incredible labor of love and each one of us invests considerable time into the meaningful projects that we get involved with.

We are inspired by Nelson Mandela’s quote: “History will judge us by the difference we make in the everyday lives of children.” And for the first 15 years of our Foundation, we did so largely passively, through our initial significant grantees: Boston Children’s Hospital, Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Horizons for Homeless Children and scholarships to The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and UCLA Anderson School.

I guess helping America’s children just wasn’t satisfying enough, or woke enough, for Ed. so…..

2016 marked a turning point for our Foundation. Ed and Barbara led a successful community-wide effort–including local, regional and national partners—to sponsor Syrian refugee families being resettled in Greater Boston. This program convinced Ed to start his next chapter, retiring from his 27-year investment management career in order to devote himself full-time to tackling the global refugee crisis.

Ed carried the highly focused approach he used during his investment career to the family’s philanthropy and decided to concentrate almost exclusively on refugees and immigration.

NPR is on it!

And, so now here we are with NPR Refugee Reporter-in-Chief, Deborah Amos, telling us all about how Shapiro is not only using his own money for refugees, but is soliciting funds elsewhere in order to move more money into the hands of mostly federal resettlement contractors to find more community sponsors for refugee families because America has run out of poor children and families in need of help.

One of the funders of Shapiro’s new gig is none other than George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.

By the way, these Leftie movers and shakers are masters at public relations and media manipulation.  A big part of what they are doing with this is to generate warm and fuzzy stories as churches, synagogues and mosques join hands to “sponsor” poor refugee families.

‘New Era In Resettlement’: U.S. Refugee Advocates Count On More Community-Based Help

When President Biden announced this week that his administration would raise the cap on refugee admissions to 62,500 for this fiscal year, refugee advocates breathed a collective sigh of relief. The number is far above the historically low limit of 15,000 refugees set by the Trump administration. Biden’s announcement was a stark turnaround after weeks of pushback from refugee advocates, outraged by a previous order keeping the 15,000 limit.

One of those most elated by this week’s announcement is Ed Shapiro, a Boston-based philanthropist and advocate for reimagining the U.S. refugee resettlement system to enable a lot more community-based efforts.

“It is the start of a new era in resettlement,” he says.

Biden’s goal, laid out in a key phrase in a February executive order, introduces “community and private sponsorship” as an innovation that allows local groups of volunteers to become part of the circuitry of resettlement, including the day-to-day tasks of helping newcomers find housing, jobs, health care and a sense of community.

Just so you know, libertarian think tank, the CATO Institute, has been pushing this concept for the last five or so years as they say here.

The goal is to not simply take better care of the refugees the government admits, as Shapiro and Amos imply, but to expand the number admitted.

As I’ve argued before, the United States could accept more refugees using private money and private sponsors without needing Congress’s sign-off.

Amos continues at NPR….

The U.S. usually resettles refugees in a different way: The State Department contracts with nine large resettlement organizations. Volunteers play a role, but the program is centered around professional caseworkers.

Here is my favorite line from Amos. She is saying what we have been saying for over a decade—the program operates in secret!

It’s all done quietly so communities don’t reject the newcomers.

Now, the higher cap on refugee admissions means Shapiro can finally accelerate a project that has consumed him for four years. His aim is to fund pilot programs to kick-start an addition to the traditional resettlement infrastructure. “There is pent-up demand and interest,” he says. “These are people, families, who want to help.”

He partnered with the Open Society Foundation and other funders to tap a pool of donors and raised $800,000 for grants awarded in March to eight U.S. community groups in seven states. Another round of grantees will be announced this month.

The proposals are moving testimonies, says Shapiro. One, from New Orleans, came from a multifaith community group that includes representatives from the oldest Jewish temple in the U.S. and a Roman Catholic congregation.

Who are the lucky winners?

Of course at this point in the NPR story I wanted to know which eight community groups got those first grants from Soros and Shapiro, but other than the one mentioned in New Orleans, Amos was mum on that.

I found them here….

They have a new name for the fund too—The Catalyst Fund!

Private Funders Unite to Support Community Sponsorship of Refugees in the United States

 

Here are the eight big winners of $100,000 each.  I have to laugh because most are among the nine federal refugee contractors*** already raking in millions of taxpayer dollars for their ‘charitable’ work.

Catholic Charities of Northeast Kansas (Kansas City, KS)

Church World Service North Carolina (Durham and Greensboro, NC)

Ethiopian Community Development Council (Denver, CO and Washington, D.C.)

Home Is Here NOLA (New Orleans, LA)

Interfaith Refugee & Immigrant Services (IRIS) & Home for Refugees USA (Los Angeles, CA)

New Roots Fund (Seattle, WA)

U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) Albany Field Office (Albany, NY)

World Relief Chicagoland (Chicago, IL)

 

***In case you are new to RRW, here are all of the nine contractors that have monopolized all refugee distribution in the US for decades.

They worked to ‘elect’ Biden/Harris and lobby for open borders.  As taxpayers you pay them millions annually to change America by changing the people.

Two of the contractors, the USCCB and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service are also paid to find locations for the Unaccompanied Alien Children.

Foreigners First! is their motto!