RefAmerica UPDATE for Summer 2020 (virtual) and 2021 (in-person): Hope you all are healthy and staying safe. Yes, RefAmerica is still looking for local American high school students who want to help promote a warm American welcome for refugees in the United States. As we will be unable to bring resettled refugee teens to Washington D.C. this summer for the RefAmerica leadership program, we plan to have a certain number of virtual sessions with a RefAmerica group of teen refugees and volunteers in July 2020 to allow participants to begin their cross-cultural experience, to begin to bond, to begin to develop story-telling and public speaking skills, and to receive some mentoring in anticipation of their in-person program in Washington next summer (2021). If you are a graduating senior, rising senior, or a rising junior, your virtual participation in this program in July 2020 could help lessen the feelings of isolation and frustration experienced by relatively recently arrived refugee teens as they attempt to operate and adapt in a new language and a foreign country during a pandemic lockdown and its aftermath. Support and insights from American peers will be invaluable to them as they try to get know their new home country and its inhabitants under very trying conditions, and volunteers will gain much from refugee insights as well.
We are accepting applications through mid-June and will interview RefAmerica applicants (by phone). (If you are interested in helping welcome refugee peers, we would suggest that this is an ideal time to focus on the RefAmerica application when you are necessarily at home and practicing social distancing.) Those accepted into the program can rest assured that so long as they qualify this year, they will have the opportunity to participate with their refugee contemporaries in the in-person program in Washington next year (health conditions permitting), and we will look to our volunteer teen participants this July to provide much-needed moral support to these refugee peers by participating in a few virtual sessions.
RefAmerica’s one-month, Washington-based, in-person program scheduled to be held next in 2021 will, as in previous years, will be held in July for six – ten recently resettled refugee high school students drawn from around the U.S. and six - ten comparably aged American teens from Montgomery County, MD, and surrounding areas.
RefAmerica is a program in leadership, public-speaking, cross-cultural understanding, and the narrative method. Participants have the opportunity to get to know Washington DC; to learn more about American immigrant stories; to engage in a unique cross-cultural program of sharing traditions, team-building experiences and personal stories; to explore their own roles within a greater American story of immigration and integration; to meet with government and legislative officials, refugee program professionals, and others; and to plan ways to welcome refugees and promote cross-cultural understanding in their home communities. The goal of RefAmerica is to promote full inclusion of recently arrived refugees in America and provide small groups of participant refugees with the tools both to tell their stories and to help forge for themselves, their families and their fellow refugees, like generations of Americans before them, a new American story. Volunteer participants in the July 2021 in-person program are eligible for SSL.
If you would like to participate in RefAmerica program (in-person July 2021 and virtually July 2020) please email refamericafoundation@gmail.com for an application.
We would also welcome hearing from anyone whose parents might want to host a recently resettled refugee high school student for the month of July 2021 or anyone who is just interested in learning more, helping in fund-raising events, or helping in any other way,
Participation in the summer program is competitive and requires an application, short bio, and resume. For this volunteer opportunity, we are looking for friendly, outgoing, supportive students with a commitment to and record of community service. In 2021 (and virtually in 2020), local volunteer participants will join with refugee participants in a wide array of cross-cultural exchange, team-building, and community service activities; build public speaking and leadership skills; and advocate for refugees. They will offer their refugee contemporaries friendship, welcome, and an introduction to teen life in their new home country. In 2021, program participants must make a full four-week commitment (including weekends). In 2020, virtual participation will be 5-8 partial days throughout July (schedule and timing collectively TBD).
RefAmerica is in its fourth year of bringing refugees and local teens together to tell their stories in a summer program of training, shared experience, and cultural exchange. Check out https://twitter.com/refugees/status/998605511833550851 for UNHCR’s animated tweet of Alaa’s story from RefAmerica 2017. You can also check online for RefAmerica's first-prize essay in the 2018 Dream Builders contest and for various NGO postings about individual refugees who have participated in the RefAmerica program.
