Isatou Barry
2018 Prize Winner
It’s 6:00 p.m. and Isatou Barry has stayed late — as she does each Monday — to oversee IRCO’s Africa House Youth Council meeting. Twelve high school students gather weekly, under Barry’s guidance, to plan programs and develop leadership skills. This meeting is different. The council has just one more day to prepare to host a cohort of visiting PanAfrican students at Africa House, and they have some decisions to make.
For starters, what should they order for lunch? Pizza in the American tradition? Or sambusa for familiarity? Which icebreaker should they play — a name game or something more active?
Barry is the Youth Program Coordinator at Africa House, a branch of Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization (IRCO). A full-time finance student at Portland State University, she moved to Portland from Gambia in 2015, and began volunteering for Africa House as an administrative assistant because she was “bored,” despite a full-time schedule of undergrad classes as PCC while acclimating to her new home here in the U.S..
On her first day as a volunteer, she was asked her to find housing for a client.
“I had no idea what I was getting in to,” Barry says. “I felt so challenged on my first day, and I was able to help that client. We filled out [a housing] application.”
So it didn’t take IRCO long to identify Barry’s ability to connect personally with IRCO’s diverse clients passing through Africa House, a one-stop shop for immigration and refugee services after arriving in Portland. She was hired pretty much on the spot.
Because Barry knows first-hand what it’s like to leave everything behind in Africa and land in Portland, the people she encounters through Africa House — including the youth council members — say Barry is open and easy to connect with.
“You can relate to her on a different level,” says Milan, co-chair of the Youth Council. Other council members say Isatou is a hard worker who doesn’t lounge, makes you feel like “you can do anything you want,” and is the “light of youth council.”
The next stop for Barry: law school, and then back to the nonprofit realm. She hopes to advocate for fair policies to help uplift minority communities.
And as for those two questions regarding visiting PanAfrican students: The Youth Council decided on sambusa for lunch. And they decided to play both musical chairs and a name game for icebreakers.
Bottom Line for Portland:
Barry’s youth programs impact more than 100 immigrant and refugee students from seven Portland schools, representing East, West and Central African nations. She reinvented the Africa House Youth Council, which builds leadership for 12+ students as they develop programs for other African immigrants and refugees in their school communities.