How One Small Nonprofit Used the Belonging Barometer to Build a Community Strategy

For decades, community revitalization has been measured by what we can easily count: number of new businesses, jobs created, building rehabilitations, affordable housing units, and dollars invested. Those metrics matter, but they don’t tell the whole story.

The Washington State Main Street Program wanted to answer a different question: Do people actually feel like they belong in their downtowns? To find out, the organization turned to the Belonging Barometer.

The Washington State Main Street Program supports approximately 80 downtown organizations across the state, helping communities preserve historic places while creating vibrant, economically thriving downtowns. For years, program leaders knew their work created social value, bringing neighbors together, creating welcoming gathering spaces, and fostering community pride, but they struggled to measure those outcomes.

“We’ve always known about the social impact of our work,” said Lydia Felty of the Washington State Main Street Program. “But articulating that social return on investment has been elusive.”

For years success was measured through tangible outcomes: buildings rehabilitated, new businesses opened, and jobs created.  

Those metrics captured economic impact, but they couldn’t answer equally important questions: Do residents feel connected to their community? Do they feel welcome in downtown spaces?o they believe they can help shape their community’s future?

“We kept asking ourselves, ‘How do you know if an event achieved something beyond bringing people downtown or increasing sales for local businesses?’ Those metrics are important—but they don’t tell the full story.”

After being introduced to the Belonging Barometer by a longtime colleague, the team immediately saw its potential and worked to put it into action.

“The Belonging Barometer provides such a clear framework for how to approach this work with a very clear ‘why,'” Felty said. “It’s difficult work, but the framework makes it accessible.”

Just as importantly, the survey was designed to be replicated and adapted for different settings.

Instead of measuring belonging broadly, Washington Main Street customized the survey to focus specifically on residents’ experiences in their downtown communities. Questions explored whether people felt emotionally connected to their downtown, welcomed by others, and able to influence decisions affecting their community.

“The survey felt incredibly adaptable,” Felty said. “If it can work nationally, locally, in workplaces, schools, and communities, surely we can apply it to our own situation.”

Rather than launching statewide, the Washington State Main Street Program began with a manageable pilot. In fall 2024, four communities participated in the first cohort. The goal was to establish a baseline and understand what using the Belonging Barometer could look like in a Main Street context. Alongside the survey, the team added historical research, site visits, and community interviews to better understand each downtown’s unique story and context.

Because belonging is deeply connected to place, they wanted the data to reflect more than survey scores alone.

“We leaned into the idea of place-based belonging,” Felty said. “What does it actually mean for people to feel like they belong in this specific downtown?”

Some of the most meaningful insights came from people’s stories. One participant described attending a sensory-friendly downtown parade with a grandchild who has autism. For that family, the event was evidence that the downtown had intentionally created an accessible space and experience where they felt welcome.

“That really stood out,” Felty said. “It was one of those moments where someone could genuinely say, ‘We belong here.'”

Stories like these helped reinforce something many community leaders already suspected: intentional programming can meaningfully shape whether people feel included.

The pilot confirmed one of the team’s initial hypotheses: people who were engaged with their local Main Street organizations generally reported a stronger sense of belonging. While the team recognizes it’s too early to draw broad causal conclusions, the findings provided important cues and a starting point.

More importantly, the process itself began changing conversations. Community partners and local organizations used the findings to rethink existing programs, asking who might still feel left out, how volunteers could feel more connected, and what small changes could make events even more welcoming.

“Even if the data doesn’t immediately tell you to do X, Y, or Z, having belonging in the collective consciousness changes the way people think,” Felty said. “It encourages organizations to make small adjustments and be more intentional about integrating resources that help people feel more connected.”

For Felty, one of the greatest strengths of the Belonging Barometer is that it helps organizations measure something many have long believed was important but couldn’t quantify.

“So often we’re measuring dollars, jobs, spending, or attendance,” she said. “Those are all important, but they only tell one part of the story.”

“Being able to measure belonging—being able to measure social impact—means we’re better able to create communities where people genuinely feel connected to each other and to the places they live. That’s the heart of the work.”

Following the success of the pilot, the Washington State Main Street Program is expanding to a second cohort of communities while continuing to learn alongside others using the Belonging Barometer. Felty encourages organizations not to wait until they have a perfect plan.

“The blueprint is already there,” she said. “You can pick it up, adapt it to your own context, and start learning.” 

The Belonging Barometer offers organizations a practical starting point and a growing community of practitioners eager to share what they’re discovering. Because while every community looks different, the question is the same:

Do people feel like they belong here?

The first step toward answering that question is simply asking it.

Ready to get started?

Download the free Belonging Barometer Quick Start Guide and survey questions to begin measuring belonging in your community.

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Deaths During ICE Operations Expose the Dangers of Mass Deportation

Washington DC, July 15 – In response to reports of a third death taking place in connection to an ICE enforcement operation in just over a week, American Immigration Council policy director Nayna Gupta issued the following statement: 

“This cannot be dismissed as a series of unrelated tragedies. This is what happens when Congress dumps billions of dollars into mass deportations instead of focusing on what’s actually broken in our immigration system.   

“The fact that ICE reportedly suspended most vehicle stops tells us that some officials recognize the current enforcement tactics are putting people in danger. But temporarily pausing one tactic is not enough. Congress has poured close to a quarter of a trillion dollars into immigration enforcement. ICE and other agencies are funded at the level of some militaries, without any of the accountability or oversight that should come with that power.  

“This is not sustainable. The impacted families and American public deserve answers about the details of these tragic killings, but this is bigger than any one incident or investigation. Congress needs to make overdue, bold changes to our immigration laws to restore credibility and humanity to immigration enforcement in American communities.   

“There is a better way forward. A working immigration system should be guided by four basic principles: first, giving longtime immigrant residents a chance to get right with the law; second, clear and targeted public safety priorities; third, more proportionate consequences for violations of the law rather than deportation for all; and finally greater accountability to rein in abuse by federal agents. Right now, the sole focus is on chasing deportation and detention quotas and that makes violence and tragic deaths inevitable. Mass deportation creates danger, not safety.”  

The American Immigration Council works to create a more welcoming and fair immigration system. Through litigation, research, and programs that expand access to legal assistance, the Council helps ensure immigrants are embraced, communities are enriched, and justice prevails for all. Follow us on BlueSky @immcouncil.org and Instagram @immcouncil.  

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The Work Authorization Gap: What Happens Between Spousal Arrival and Legal Employment Eligibility

The period between an immigrant spouse's arrival and the point at which they can legally work is not a bureaucratic footnote. It is a designed interval — one that shapes the financial, psychological, and logistical reality of an entire household, often for months.

This is what that gap actually looks like, what it costs, and what it reveals about who immigration administration is built to serve.

When a spouse arrives on a spousal visa, the clock does not start on employment. It starts on paperwork. The work authorization application cannot be filed until after arrival. Processing takes months. During that window, the arriving spouse cannot earn income — legally — regardless of their qualifications, their prior career, or the household's financial need. The citizen or permanent resident spouse carries the full economic weight. Savings draw down. Stress accumulates. The household operates at a structural deficit that the system created and the system does not compensate for.

The administrative requirements during this period are not light. There are forms, fees, biometric appointments, medical examinations, evidence packages. Each step requires money the household is now managing on one income. Each step requires time — time spent gathering documents, waiting for appointments, following up on requests. The arriving spouse, who cannot work, often becomes the de facto project manager of their own immigration case, which is its own form of labor the system does not count.

What confirms this pattern is not one household's experience. It is the structure of the process itself. The gap is not an accident of backlog or a temporary processing delay. It is the sequence the system requires. Arrival first. Application after arrival. Authorization after application review. Employment after authorization. That chain is the policy. The waiting is built in.

The mechanism is straightforward: employment authorization is treated as a separate determination from admission. Being admitted as a spouse does not mean being admitted as a worker. Those are two different statuses, two different applications, two different timelines. The logic, from an administrative standpoint, is about maintaining distinct categories of permission. From a household standpoint, the logic produces a period of legally enforced financial dependency with no accommodation, no bridge benefit, and no expedited pathway based on economic hardship.

Who bears the cost is not ambiguous. The arriving spouse bears the psychological cost of enforced idleness in a new country where they have no established network, no income, and no professional identity yet. The sponsoring spouse bears the financial cost of sole-income household support during one of the most expensive and logistically demanding periods of their shared life. Neither the agency processing the application nor the government that designed the sequence bears any cost at all. The fee revenue flows in one direction. The waiting flows in the other.

The incentive structure is worth naming plainly. There is no institutional penalty for slow processing. There is no refund if authorization takes longer than estimated. There is no mechanism by which the household's financial deterioration creates pressure on the system to move faster. The household absorbs the cost of delay. The agency does not. That asymmetry is not incidental — it is how the system is calibrated.

The doctrine point here is transferable. When an institution separates eligibility from admission and places the cost of that gap entirely on the applicant, it is not failing to serve the applicant. It is succeeding at serving a different priority — control of status categories, revenue from fees, administrative convenience. Understanding what an institution is actually optimized for requires looking at who absorbs friction and who does not. In this case, the answer is consistent and structural.

The work authorization gap is a small episode in a large system. But small episodes, examined carefully, show you the system's actual values. This one shows that immigrant households are expected to fund and absorb the cost of a categorization process that was not designed around their continuity. That is not a complaint. It is a description. And descriptions, held clearly, are where doctrine begins.

Federal Court Delivers Major Blow to Trump Detention Policy of Jailing Immigrants With No Hearing, No Explanation

WASHINGTON, D.C., July 3, 2026 — On July 2, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that people facing immigration detention have the right to meaningful due process protections and must be afforded a bond hearing within 90 days. The decision deals a major blow to the Trump administration’s new mass detention efforts, rejecting the government’s argument that it can detain people without ever having to justify it to a judge. 

At the center of the case are three fathers of U.S. citizen children—all longtime Texas residents with no criminal history—who were arrested following routine traffic stops and detained without any meaningful opportunity to challenge whether that detention was necessary. The American Immigration Council and the National Immigration Project argued before the Fifth Circuit on behalf of these three men, whose cases were consolidated for appeal.

“This case asked a simple question: if the government wants to lock someone up, does it have to show that imprisonment serves a purpose?” said Rebecca Cassler, senior litigation attorney at the American Immigration Council, who argued the case. “Today’s decision reaffirms that constitutional rights do not disappear simply because someone is in immigration proceedings. The government must provide a meaningful opportunity for people to challenge their detention.” 

In its decision, the court held that the Constitution does not allow the government to detain noncitizens for “indefinite and extensive periods of time without an individualized determination.” Noncitizens detained under the government’s recently expanded mandatory detention policy are entitled to a bond hearing within 90 days of their arrest, and at that hearing, the government must provide an individualized justification for continued detention. It cannot simply hold someone because of how they entered the country, no matter what the immigration detention statute says. 

“The Fifth Amendment has protected people living in this country from being imprisoned without justification for well over a century. What it doesn’t do is enforce itself,” said Ellie Norton, Senior Staff Attorney, of the National Immigration Project. “Ignacio, Alejandro, and Miguel are fathers who have lived in Texas for more than a decade. They’re the reason this court had to confront the question of whether the government can detain people like them without any checks and balances. Thousands of people in detention will benefit from what these three men were willing to fight for.” 

The decision will provide crucial due process protections for people held in immigration detention throughout Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, states that collectively hold some of the largest immigration detention populations in the country. The court’s ruling has enormous implications for the thousands of noncitizens the government has detained in these states without any due process. It requires the administration to justify their incarceration and the expenditure of millions of taxpayer dollars on detention of people who have built their lives in and contributed to this country. 

Immigration detention has expanded dramatically under the second Trump administration, while reports of overcrowding, inadequate medical care, and a record number of deaths in custody have continued to mount. Without the chance to go before a judge, people who pose no danger and no flight risk can remain incarcerated for prolonged periods while their immigration cases proceed. The Fifth Circuit’s decision puts an end to this injustice.

Additional context on the ruling:

For any noncitizen held under 8 U.S.C. 1225(b)(2)(A) and thus subject to mandatory detention under the Fifth Circuit’s ruling in Buenrostro-Mendez v. Bondi, 166 F.4th 494, 506 (5th Cir. 2026), “the Government must show” that the individual presents an “identified and articulable threat” or flight risk. Relying on Supreme Court precedent, the court held that individuals detained under this statute must be provided bond hearings within 90 days of their detention, where the government must articulate an “individualized justification” for continued detention. The court made clear that its ruling does not require every single noncitizen subject to mandatory detention in the Fifth Circuit to file an individual habeas petition to get this relief.

Read the ruling here.

More about the lawsuit here.

MEDIA CONTACTS

Elyssa Pachico, epachico@immcouncil.org 

Lilly Gonzalez, media@nipnlg.org 

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The National Immigration Project is a membership organization of attorneys, advocates, and community members who believe that all people should be treated with dignity, live freely, and flourish. We litigate, advocate, educate, and build bridges across movements to ensure that those most impacted by the immigration and criminal systems are uplifted and supported. Learn more at nipnlg.org. Follow the National Immigration Project on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads at @NIPNLG.

The American Immigration Council works to create a more welcoming and fair immigration system. Through litigation, research, and programs that expand access to legal assistance, the Council helps ensure immigrants are embraced, communities are enriched, and justice prevails for all. Follow us on BlueSky @immcouncil.org and Instagram @immcouncil.   

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Dear Immigrant: The Job Is Not the Life

Letter 07

Re: The Job Is Not the Life

Dear Immigrant,

In the first years, it is easy to confuse the job with the life. The job is what you came for, in the practical sense — the income, the visa status, the structure of the day. It fills the hours and it provides the identity marker that the new country understands: what do you do. You are what you do, in the way the new country reads people, and having a job is the evidence that you exist in a legible form.

But the job is not the life. The life is everything the job does not cover: the relationships, the community, the things you do because they give you something that money does not measure, the interior growth that happens outside of working hours.

Immigrants who reduce their lives to the job are, in my observation, the immigrants who are most likely to arrive at year five or year ten having built financial stability and nothing else. They have the salary and the apartment and the credit score. They do not have the community or the depth or the sense that the life they are living belongs fully to them. The job was the means. The life was supposed to be the end. Somewhere in the accumulation of working hours, the means became the end and the end was forgotten.

Protect time for the things that are not the job. This is harder than it sounds when you are working long hours and recovering from long hours and calling home and managing paperwork and trying to survive financially. There is not much time left. Use what there is for something that feeds you.

The job provides the platform. The life is what you build on it. Do not confuse the platform for the building.

From someone who eventually remembered to build,
A former immigrant

dearimmigrant.com