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Natalie Winters recently highlighted Welcoming America, a nonprofit that trains local leaders, coaches communities, and pushes narrative campaigns so rural places will learn to accept and celebrate rapid demographic changes taking place through immigration.
The group’s 2022 annual report identified the Town of Mansfield as one of just 10 communities nationwide selected for its Rural Welcoming Initiative. Those places received monthly coaching, peer learning, funding for Welcoming Week events, and free network membership.
Carnegie Corporation of New York has funded Welcoming America since 2013. In December 2025 it awarded the group $500,000 over 24 months for a project “to reshape the narrative about immigrants in new destination states,” listed under the heading “Strengthening U.S. Democracy.” The grant funds narrative training, a multimedia campaign, and a 2026 State of Welcoming Report aimed at rural and politically diverse areas.
Mansfield, home to UConn and roughly 28,000 people, has been part of the Welcoming Network for years. The town adopted a 2017 policy resolution telling staff not to ask about or act on immigration status. It has also distributed state resources on rights for undocumented families.
Connecticut shows up elsewhere in Welcoming America’s directory and reports. Building One Community in Stamford has long been a member. It provides ESL, legal services, and workforce programs and has served more than 22,500 people from 133 countries. Hartford Public Library (The American Place), International Hartford, Otis Library in Norwich, and EASTCONN in Hampton have also been listed as network members.
Welcoming America’s Rural Welcoming Initiative, launched in 2019, targets places under 50,000 people. It supplies coaching, policy guidance, and storytelling tools that encourage communities to treat immigration as an economic and cultural plus. The materials emphasize emotion and local media over broader cost questions.
That framing is hard to square with numbers released this week. Connecticut Voices for Children reported that 47 percent of noncitizens in the state lived in or near poverty from 2023 to 2025. Overall poverty hit 10.6 percent in 2025—the highest in seven years of available data—after temporary pandemic benefits ended. Hispanic residents were at 41 percent and Black residents at 33 percent on the same near-poverty measure.
Stamford already has a large foreign-born population. Mansfield sits next to a major university and has pursued "welcoming" policies for years. Neither fact answers how more rapid demographic change, advanced with NGO money and national coaching, affects local schools, housing, or public services when nearly half of noncitizens are already at or near the poverty line.
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