The following projects expand upon the day-to-day activities and mission of SHINE. Each project fulfills a specific need found in the communities SHINE serves and embodies SHINE's core values of intercultural and intergenerational understanding, healthcare access improvement, service learning and capacity building.
Civic Engagement for All Initiative
SHINE has long recognized and valued what our older learners have to offer. While learning English from young college students, elders share their stories of perseverance, generosity and joy despite great hardships and inspire our students to value their 
own opportunities and help them realize their potential to make positive changes in the world.
Yet community contributions of older immigrants and refugees are often unknown to those outside their communities.
In 2007, SHINE launched the Civic Engagement for All Initiative, a multi-faceted project to document and promote the civic engagement of older immigrants and refugees across the country. In the fall of 2008 we'll release a publication of our major findings, and are currently working on trainings for organizations who wish to engage older immigrants and refugees, as well as providing support to a number of community organizations to create service and leadership roles for their older immigrant or refugee constituents.
MetLife Health Literacy Initiative
The Project SHINE-MetLife Foundation Health Literacy Initiative builds national partnerships among universities and community-based organizations to address the health literacy needs of older immigrants and refugees to navigate through the oftentimes complicated healthcare system.
Click here for materials created as a product of MetLife Foundation Health Literacy Initiative.
The Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 denied most forms of public assistance to most legal immigrants for five years or until they attain citizenship. The new law placed a higher urgency on completing the naturalization 
process for many of the elderly immigrants Project SHINE serves. SHINE engaged this legislation head on by emphasizing citizenship in its tutoring programs.
At San Francisco State University, SHINE faculty developed a Learner's Lives as Curriculum framework to create thematic units integrating civic concepts into SHINE tutors' lessons . Learners need these concepts to understand and complete the naturalization process. First Amendment Plus provides an overview of the Learner's Lives as Curriculum framework and the process that led to the creation of citizenship thematic units.
