The MurthyNAYAK Foundation supports the Episcopal Refugee & Immigrant Center Alliance – ERICA – a resource center for refugees, asylees and immigrants in the Baltimore-Washington area. In 2010, the MurthyNAYAK Foundation sponsored ERICA’s annual benefit concert, Music and Stories of Migration, which featured outstanding musicians from the Peabody Conservatory – most of them immigrants – and first-person accounts of the immigration odysseys that brought three ERICA clients to America.

With the support of the MurthyNAYAK Foundation, ERICA has helped immigrant and refugee families to weather rent and utility emergencies, and has provided no-interest legal-aid and family-reunification loans to clients in need. ERICA also offers one-on-one casework assistance and referrals to community services, helping clients to overcome obstacles that stand between them and jobs, educational opportunities, health care, and resettlement assistance. To help clients adjust to their new lives in the United States, ERICA provides educational programs, including English classes and cross-cultural workshops on financial literacy, health care access, legal rights and responsibilities, entrepreneurship, and computer and internet skills.

ERICA’s goal is to empower immigrants, providing the resources and information they need to become self-sufficient, full participants in the common life of our society. The MurthyNAYAK Foundation actively supports these goals.

Further information on ERICA is on the web at www.erica-baltimore.org.