BRUNSWICK — When Brunswick Junior High School students Sora Reynolds and Olivia Marcotte approached the Maine Access Immigrant Network a year ago about raising money for new Mainers, they had no idea just how much the extra help would eventually be needed. 

Reynold and Marcotte, rising freshmen, chose the network for their Girl Scouts “Silver Award,” a community service project that comes with the highest award a Girl Scout can earn. 

For a year, the girls took turns babysitting for local families, saving up the money they earned. They continued their efforts even after their troop disbanded, meaning they could no longer get the Girl Scout award.  

“We said we would do it, so we kept that promise,” Reynolds said last week. “It was nice to do something helpful.” 

The Maine Access Immigrant Network is a community health organization dedicated to helping immigrants, asylum seekers, refugees and other new Mainers navigate health care literacy, enrollment and benefits and non-clinical care, according to its website. 

Reynolds and Marcotte raised $500 for the organization, which has been firing on all cylinders this summer. Since June, the city of Portland has received 379 migrants, most of whom fled violence and persecution in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola. City officials established an emergency shelter at the Portland Expo, but need to relocate people in housing as soon as possible. 

Founded by Mohamud Barre in 2002 as the Somali Culture and Development Association, the network is dedicated to helping other immigrants in the same way that Barre felt he was helped when he first came to Portland. 

Almost everyone at the Maine Immigrant Access Network is either an asylee, refugee or immigrant themselves, said Sarah Lewis, who, as a Vermonter, is the only person on staff who was born in the United States. The office has been like “a little mini-United Nations” since inception, she said. 

Public health “Has the power to cut through politics and cultural barriers,” she said. “Humanity is pretty much behind the belief that we all deserve to be healthy, to be well.”

Working with people in their native languages, be it French, Arabic, Somali or Lingala, they help people fill in the non-clinical pieces of social wellness like housing, food security, safety and more. For the pieces they cannot fill, Lewis and her team will issue referrals to doctors and therapists that they know have experience working with refugee and immigrant populations. 

She and her coworkers are exhausted as they try to help as many people as they can, she said, “but this is exactly what our organization was built for. … We’re doing the same thing we’ve been doing, just at an increased level.”

As a group that relies on grant funding, donations like the one from Reynolds and Marcotte allow them to expand their hours and work with more people. 

Lewis said she was “floored” with the follow-through, and especially impressed with Reynolds and Marcotte for working for the money. “I feel like in today’s age, it’s easier to do a Facebook fundraiser, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” she said, “but part of me worries that this younger generation may be missing out on what it feels like to have to do work to be giving back. It makes me happy to hear people are still doing that.” 

Reynolds said she did not currently have any plans to raise money for the nearly 60 migrants who are expected to resettle in Brunswick in the coming weeks, but that she may volunteer in other capacities. 

hlaclaire@timesrecord.com