Grant to L.B. College Aimed at Reaching Cambodian Refugees

Long Beach City College has received a $20,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Labor to set up a program for the local Cambodian community.

The grant, to be combined with $65,000 in federal funds from the college’s refugee assistance program, is an outgrowth of a September, 1984, conference held at the college entitled “Southeast Asian Women in Transition: A New Life in a Strange Land.” The money, said Arlyss Burkett, college director of public relations, will be used to hire a bilingual counselor to circulate in the Long Beach Cambodian community, providing educational counseling and identifying specific educational needs.

“Many immigrant women don’t get out to learn English because they have no place to leave their children,” Burkett said. “Child care and counseling were major needs identified by the conference.”

In addition to counseling and child care, she said, the money will be used to provide books, transportation and vocational training to the immigrants. The program will focus on Cambodians, she said, because many local Vietnamese--who generally arrived in the country earlier than the Cambodians--have already passed through the LBCC program.

“We’ve never done this before,” she said, referring to the outreach program. “In the past, the students have always come to us.”