New American Welcome Center

The New American Welcome Center grew out of student organizing at the University YMCA. In 2010 the Latino student group La Colectiva joined the Y and began meeting with immigrants and the agencies that served them; those meetings became the C-U Immigration Forum. In 2011 the Y opened an immigrant helpline, soon called La Línea, answered by student volunteers in Spanish and later French. The Forum's campaign against the federal Secure Communities program, DACA workshops in 2012, and the Y's decision in 2013 to give up a church grant rather than leave the state immigrant coalition made the Y a center of immigrant justice work in Champaign-Urbana.

In December 2016 YMCA of the USA chose the University YMCA for its national network of New American Welcome Centers, with a $40,000 seed grant, and the center was launched at the Y on March 27, 2017, with Gloria Yen as its founding director. It added Welcoming Week, citizenship classes, Justice Department–recognized legal services (2019), community navigators, an Immigrant Relief Fund that carried families through the pandemic, and the Champaign County Welcoming Plan (2021). In 2023 it moved to Lincoln Square in Urbana. It continues today under director Francisco Baires, who ran La Línea in its first years.