Torus English learning app for immigrants and refugees

In immigrant and refugee communities, there is a lack of access to linguistically and culturally responsive and relevant resources in aspects relating to emergency preparedness, navigating local systems and healthcare, and employment. If not addressed, these hurdles can lead to long term negative health and mental health outcomes, reductions in household income, and contribution to society. We recognize this lack of access as a huge barrier to safety, connectivity and emotional well-being in our communities. Which is why we have built a safe space for these vulnerable communities to feel comfortable to practice their skills while also learning to navigate different societal systems and build relationships. We address these challenges within our app to best serve our community and help immigrants and refugees acclimate to the US. 

“Oregon has a sizable community of immigrants. About 9.9 percent of the state’s residents are foreign-born…”* 

Oregon has welcomed more than 60,000 refugees since 1975, there is a large market in our community for our services.** 

In Oregon, 29% of adult immigrants had a college degree or more education in 2018, while 31% had less than a high school diploma. Immigrants have a wide range of education and needs as they move to Oregon.***

*https://map.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/locations/oregon/

**https://www.multco.us/global/refugee-services#:~:text=A%20refugee%20is%20any%20person,former%20Soviet%20Union%20and%20Vietnam.

***https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/immigrants-oregon

Specifically, The Torus application serves as a comprehensive platform, harmoniously integrating the three pivotal elements of our operations: learners, volunteers, and the dynamic interaction amongst them and our staff. This multifaceted tool is designed to foster a seamless and efficient workflow, enhancing our collective productivity and engagement. Among many features, it will have culturally and linguistically responsive teaching tools. For example, quizzes, translation feature for 6 most common languages spoken in Oregon (Dari, Russian, Ukrainian, Mandarin, Spanish and Vietnamese), grammar correction feature and a messaging feature designed to help learners seamlessly communicate with their teachers and Torus staff. Ourapp will help our immigrants and refugees who are learning English by giving them more practice in English skills (both grammar and conversational) through relevant real world modules. We are proposing modules that will be targeted to studying and practicing for citizenship and driving tests addressing immediate needs and long-term goals, both of which open new doors for opportunities to immigrant and refugee communities.

We serve populations who have experienced significant bias and/or discrimination. We serve immigrants and refugees mainly in Oregon and Southwest Washington who are 18+ and our learners represent 27 different first spoken languages. As of recently, we have had a special emphasis on serving Ukrainian and Afghan refugees and immigrants. Due to our unique position to serve communities across different cultures and languages, we are able to tailor our services to best serve them based on their needs and we translate certain curricula to non-dominant languages to ensure an equitable distribution of resources. 

Through education and community connection we promote ownership that is essential to change and mitigate the barriers of feeling isolated, disconnected, and powerless in a new country. As a result, the long-lasting effects are that immigrant and refugee communities are directly involved in making decisions that affect their communities, feel a sense of belonging and language ownership rather than imitation of the dominant culture. In addition, our communities develop skills, relationships, and connections that help them to; advocate for issues that matter to them, create relationships that they can rely on in times of need, and accomplish personal goals such as securing new job opportunities and passing their citizenship test.

Torus was founded in 2020 by Ramin Tokhi, a naturalized citizen of the U.S. who immigrated with his family from Afghanistan to Russia and ultimately, the United States. He currently resides in Portland, Oregon and founded Torus to not only aid others experiencing similar hurdles he faced when beginning life anew, but to express gratitude by giving back to the communities that once welcomed his family as refugees. The fact that he speaks both Dari and Russian enables us to work with refugees, asylees, and parolees from Afghanistan to help them find jobs in Oregon. In addition, we work closely with Slavic and Eastern European partners by providing our unique, culturally sensitive, trauma-informed English classes to Ukrainians to help them acclimate to the US systems.

Torus bridges gaps between people and communities by facilitating transformative experiences of language and culture exchange. We envision a future where everyone experiences mutually transformative relationships across culture and language while simultaneously holding a deep sense of belonging both to their own culture and to a broader multicultural and multilingual society.

Our Torus App first launched on April 25, 2022 in partnership with the Oregon Health Authority and FEMA. For the purpose of the project at the time, the app was built to feature Covid-19 and vaccine information in simplified English, designed for English learners, and was also able to be translated into three other languages (Dari, Thai and Russian). The app was available to download through our website and we had approximately 300 downloads.

Here is a link to our first launch of the app: https://covidblog.oregon.gov/new-app-helps-russian-thai-and-persian-language-speakers-find-information-about-covid-19/

Since this project has ended, we have been working on our app to update and provide new information and serve other uses such as messaging between learners and teachers. We are now in the prototype phase of the next version of the app. Currently, we are testing the app for bugs and our staff and app developers have access to the demo version of the app through testflight and Google console. We are working on getting it ready to be launched in the Apple Store and Google Play for select users to test and provide feedback.

We are applying to Solve to get technical and financial help to develop some components of the app. For example, integrating AI tools to enhance language learning experiences of immigrants and refugees. One specific example is an AI that can text in non-dominant languages such as Dari, Thai, Swahili, or Ukrainian. This is to help most vulnerable community members to utilize AI in their language to get the resources and information whenever they need it. In addition, we are looking to extend our reach to other tech nonprofits to learn about their solutions to language learning and resource sharing. Our goal is to seek a well-rounded collaboration including funding, networking, and cross-organizational collaboration.

What makes this app unique and innovative is its focus on a specific community with a lens of culturally and linguistically responsive teaching and learning as well as resource sharing. We are helping people who are on the margins, who are often wary or distrustful of other platforms because of subscription fees, their data being sold or inability to understand all of its functionality. This includes both volunteers and learners. We had volunteers numerous times declining to volunteer with us because we require them to use WhatsApp as a communication tool. Some reasons for not using WhatsApp was that it belongs to Meta and some volunteers did not want to support Meta as a corporation, and WhatsApp’s functionality is too complex for some volunteers and learners. We will be addressing both by creating a curriculum called “Digital Fluency” by helping them understand how the Torus app works and how to use all of its functionality effectively.   

While there may be apps that are dedicated to language learning, our approach is different in that we have created a teaching model that is specifically designed for teaching English to immigrants and refugees because we understand their struggles and hesitancy to work with major corporations.

Our approach to learning English promotes ownership that is essential to change and mitigate the barriers of feeling isolated, disconnected, and powerless in a new country. As a result, the long-lasting effects are that immigrant and refugee communities are directly involved in making decisions that affect their communities, feel a sense of belonging and language ownership rather than imitation of the dominant culture. In addition, our communities develop skills, relationships, and connections that help them to advocate for issues that matter to them in a supportive environment, as well as accomplish personal goals such as securing new job opportunities and pass their citizenship test. This app will provide access to important information as well as support immigrants and refugees journey in learning and navigating Oregon and eventually the US systems. 

Impact Goals:

1. Easy distribution of materials and resources to our community members.

2. Give our learners access to resources beyond classroom time.

3. Help immigrants and refugees practice passing their drivers and citizenship classes.

Indicators:

1. Track app downloads and usage details to see what information is being accessed by those who use the app. 

2. Ask for app feedback from our learners and app users.

3. We currently ask our program learners to tell us about personal milestones that they are working towards, we then check in every 5 weeks to assess the status of their milestones, how we have helped them, and how we can help them in the next coming 5 weeks. 

The core technology that powers our solution is a mobile app built in ReactNative that has several important capabilities for transforming immigrant and refugee lives. Namely SMS technology, AI integration that is able to communicate in multiple languages that are commonly shared among immigrants and refugees in Oregon, translation into non-dominant languages, and our culturally and linguistically teaching approach to learning English and navigating the US systems. 

Our solution team consists of our Executive Director, 2 Vazco team developers who are contractors (One is a Scrum Master the other is a developer of the messaging feature), 2 volunteer QA testers, and 3 volunteer developers.

We have been working on our solution for 2 years. 

Our organization is also led by a diverse group of Board members and executive leadership. Members of our staff and Board are immigrants and people of color and as an immigrant/refugee led organization we are creating immigrant refugee leaders who can more responsibly address the needs and goals of these communities. 

We are continuously asking our learners to participate in our organization in various ways, such as volunteering with social media help, joining our Board of Directors, helping with translation of materials, and participating with us in our language fairs to share their cultures and language with attendees.

Our primary activity is to offer free one-on-one and community-based, multilevel, group English classes tailored to immigrant and refugee communities which help them develop language and life skills simultaneously to ease how they navigate the US culture and systems. Our goal is to make the Torus app a bigger part of our English learning programs by utilizing it for internal communications, grammar and pronunciation practice, and an archive or relevant resources to these vulnerable communities.  

We see Torus as a fluency-based organization rather than a literacy program. The word literacy fundamentally means the ability to read and write. Fluency on the other hand is the ability to create and produce original content, thoughts, or conversation. Through this method, particularly with the help of paid teachers in our group class settings, we are giving learners the complete set of skills to not only read and write about policies, but put them into action. For instance, now that learners know how to use local transportation, they are able to get to a bank to open up an account, or search for apartments while interacting with native English speakers. Program participants attend our classes to practice fluency, learn new information, and make connections with other members in their communities, and leave our programs feeling more connected to their community and equipped with the tools needed to navigate local systems, secure employment, and advocate for their community.

In 2023, we were able to serve: 124 virtual one-on-one learners, 7 virtual multi-learner class learners, 59 virtual group class learners, and 428 in-person group class learners. We directly served 573 unique learners in all class types and we anticipate being able to serve over 600 learners in 2024. Since our inception in 2020, we have been able to directly serve 951 unique individuals and over 145 learners have attended multiple different class types. There’s a lot of coordination from our Executive Director, Volunteer Coordinator, learner onboarding specialist, and our teachers that goes into this, particularly as we expand to two new in person locations this year.

Our impact is best described through learner testimonials, for example:

“Hello, my name is Fawzia and I’m from Afghanistan. Six years ago I came to the US with my four kids. I felt like a new born baby not being able to speak the language and not knowing the culture. I faced a lot of challenges adapting to the new environment with my family. I started taking classes with Torus and it helped me immensely. I learned to improve my spelling, writing, speaking and English over all. I loved all my teachers. I want to thank the teachers from the bottom of my heart for the encouragement and support they give us.”

Fawzia’s testimonial is just one of the success stories that our participants have achieved. Support would allow us to continue to grow our language programs, specifically reaching communities in need of services, and develop culturally relevant curriculum to enhance the literacy and fluency services we offer.

In addition to seeking funding from local, and non-local foundations as well as government grants, in 2023 we implemented a fee for service to our partner organizations. With this revenue a large portion of our program expenses will be covered by the organization hosting our in-person classes throughout Portland. We have been expanding to more locations to host our classes and these new partnerships will allow us to not only expand our services and reach more individuals, but also account for 30-40% of our operating budget.