Volunteer of the Month Nubia Espana has been a Citizenship Now! Volunteer Corps member for close to two years. As a volunteer Nubia says CUNY Citizenship Now! allows her to help and bring hope to "her immigrant brothers and sisters." She came to the United States at 21 and did not speak one word of English. Fast forward to today and she is a successful professional mother of three who teaches English as a Second Language (ESL). Read more about Nubia and our other Corps members!
Recent Events
CUNY Citizenship Now! recently held its first two Citizenship Application Assistance Events of 2013 at The City College in Manhattan. Our first event held on January 11, was a computer-based event where we helped 23 participants apply for citizenship. The next day we held a larger scale event where 41 volunteers assisted 80 New Yorkers with their citizenship applications. Council Member Inez E. Dickens, who sponsored the event credited all the volunteers and CUNY Citizenship Now! staff with making this event happen.Read More.
Upcoming Citizenship Now! Trainings Citizenship Now! will soon begin holding several trainings for volunteers. Our first confirmed training is scheduled for Tuesday, January 29th. The training will be an overview on the Citizenship Works online tool that makes it easier for participants to fill out their N-400 form at our events. On February 4th we will hold an application assistance training that will be open also to new Corps members. This training will be repeated on February 6th. Keep your eyes open for an invitation in your inbox soon!
You are a volunteer at the "Application Assistance" station. You are helping a participant complete the Form N-400. You are at Part 7.C of the form that requests you to list all the trips of 24 hours or more the applicant has taken outside the United States since becoming a lawful permanent resident.
True or False? You need only list trips outside the United States for the last five years (or 3 years) based on the amount of time the applicant can demonstrate continuous residence in the United States. You do not need to list trips more than 5 (or 3) years ago because by statute (i.e., the Immigration and Nationality Act) the applicant for naturalization need only demonstrate trips for her/his statutory period of continuous residence.
At Citizenship Now! we are always trying to improve the quality of services we provide at our events. We also aim to make the participants and volunteers' experience, a pleasant one. As we have been telling our volunteers in our event invitations over the past months, we assign our volunteers to stations based in factors like skills, experience and the needs of the event. We make these assignments before the event. Therefore, we no longer can accommodate walk-in volunteers at our events. Please do not show up on the day of an event without having registered. Please make sure to register prior to our events, and when you do so, make sure that you receive a confirmation message (click here to view a sample confirmation message). If you don't receive one, please contact us at [email protected] and we'll be happy to help. Thank you for understanding.
I was charged with possessing a knife, but the judge discharged the case. This happened when I was just 17. Will I have a problem becoming a U.S. citizen?