Formerly at CERI, New Light Wellness serves Southeast Asian families and communities impacted by deportation across borders and across seas by nurturing trust, collective healing, and reunification.
New Light Wellness shines a light on the stigma of incarceration, detention and deportation and uplifts community driven modalities of healing where all people impacted by the traumas of deportation receives wellness support. In the next two years, the organization will strive to establish a presence in Cambodia and co-create wellness ecosystems with the guidance of our impacted individuals. New Light Wellness will also launch an impacted leaders fellowship and workforce development program.
Impact Highlights
- New Light Program: In 2021, CERI launched the New Light Program: a mental health outreach program serving those deported to Cambodia seeded by a grant from New Breath Foundation. In its first year alone, New Light outreached to over 40 participants and provided over 60 individual sessions to 16 enrolled members—and those numbers continue to grow every year. One participant shared that the psychological, physical, and spiritual care they received from the New Light Program made them feel truly seen and valued. In the sacred, safe space of the New Light Program, participants can unravel the many decades of trauma caused by genocide camps, the refugee and resettlement experience, their courageous journey in the prison pipeline, ICE detention, and deportation to Cambodia. Many participants describe to New Light Program team members how they feel isolated, rejected, and forgotten once in Cambodia. They also feel they cannot disclose their deported status to the locals there, for fear of persecution and further isolation.
- July 2024, New Light Wellness has emerged and become its own organization with the leadership of CoFounder and Executive Director, Elijah Chhum. This organization is fiscally sponsored by Philanthropic Ventures Foundation.