With support from the Olson Foundation, Connect Casino Road’s AFAR program provides culturally tailored, bilingual mentoring and support to immigrant families in a historically underserved neighborhood—empowering them to break cycles of poverty and create lasting, multigenerational change within their community.
The program offers holistic, local access to mental health care, education, economic resources, and community-building tools—helping both caregivers and children grow into leaders and agents of transformation.
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Casino Road is the most densely populated and diverse neighborhood in Snohomish County. It also is one of the lowest income neighborhoods in the county, with more than double the county’s poverty rate. Casino Road is home to a very large and diverse immigrant population, with one in four residents having been born outside the US.
Born from community stakeholders and an innovative funder at the Community Foundation of Snohomish County in 2017, Connect Casino Road is a collaborative effort in a diverse, engaged, and historically underinvested low-income neighborhood in South Everett.
Connect Casino Road brings to life the community's vision by eliminating barriers through The Village community center with 24+ partner programs, holistic family case management, and advocacy. With their partners, they empower marginalized families for sustainable change.
Supported by The Olson Foundation, Connect Casino Road’s All Families Are Ready (AFAR) mentoring and counseling program is culturally and linguistically appropriate for Casino Road’s most vulnerable immigrant families. Within one-mile walking distance from their homes, families receive personalized bilingual coaching, mental health counseling, basic needs support, educational and economic opportunities, and direct access to a variety of other resources through onsite partner programs.
The needs of families are complex and interconnected, from language support, financial stability, health, social connections, to education. To overcome such diverse challenges requires a holistic and personalized approach.
Connect Casino Road and the AFAR program has had a multi-generational impact on families. A recent AFAR graduate described the empowering impact the program had on her entire family:
“Here the abundance of tools, patience, compassion, and love that they gave me was what helped me a lot… to give those tools to pass to my children: first to me, and then the children.”
By simultaneously addressing the needs of both the caregivers and children in the family, the AFAR program disrupts cycles of intergenerational poverty and empowers families to become agents of change. Participants have created empowerment and advocacy groups, a childcare co-op, led volunteer groups to support other families, started a new business, and more.
Alvaro Guillen, the Director for Connect Casino Road said, "We are grateful for the Olson Foundation's support that allowed us to sustain and grow our impact on the most vulnerable low-income families within the Casino Road neighborhood. Families we work with receive wrap-around case management services, access free, bilingual and bicultural mental health counseling and are connected to more than 20 resources and programs offered at our community center. Thanks to the Olson Family, we are able to meet long-lasting and emerging community needs."
