 I'm a member of the program. The volunteers running Ollie right now are very reduced-worms so I encourage any of you who might be interested in keeping this program going to let us know. Grace Worcester right here, Michelle Champault, and the mainstay of Ollie for who knows how many years, but I suppose you felt right there. And we have one new member, Jenny Callan, who could not be here at this time, but you'll see her at once. So I form a welcome back to Ollie. Most of you probably got the brochure in the mail if you're on our mailing list, and if you're not on our mailing list and want to be pleased, make sure we have your name and email list. And I want to mention, next week, a week from today, we will have this person who is doing our filming today, is going to present her own film that's part of a series that she's been doing on Vermonters, The Card Man of the Land, that's in here, and there are a few extra of these brochures if you'd like them. So welcome back, we're thrilled to be here, and oh, and lastly, yes, most important, those of you who have been coming to Ollie for the years know that we have a wonderful volunteer who remains with us, Amalia DiStefano, who has been making cookies forever. And she is wonderful, and she insists on doing it, and she wanted to welcome you back, so there are little, we can't really get and drink here yet until we are rid of all our masks, but there are little packets of cookies for each of you, please take one. Thank you very much. So I just wanted to let you know, since you're here, I might as well tell you, this is March somehow, we don't know how that happened, but we're really excited to be basically putting on a whole month of not only osher lectures every month, but we also have a really robust March for Meals celebration happening this week. This month to raise awareness and funds for our Feast Senior Meals program, Meals on Meals. So if you're interested in learning more about that, we've got lots of information, we're going to be doing a community champion week, the week of March 21st through the 25th. We'll have lots of exciting guest delivery drivers coming, and we also will be having a delicious Mediterranean meal for curbside pickup on Friday the 25th, as well as an online event. So I'm very excited to be hosting a number of folks who will be coming online with me to celebrate Meals on Meals, including some local famous people and some larger from far away famous people. So I'm very excited to be doing that for everyone and really just thank you again for being here. We have also our spring classes will be a registration starts next week, so if you're looking for other ways to engage and play, we've got lots of ways to do that. Thank you again for being here, and I'll fit up to you. It feels so good to be back here. Welcome everybody. Before I introduce our speaker, which I'm very excited to do, I wanted to mention a local thing related to our speaker. We have a local called Central Vermont Refugee Action Group that is very active right now dealing with the settlement of a member of Afghan families. And I wanted to point out right here, Kathy O'Connor, and I've had a brain glitch from a member of that group, and I want to point them out to you if you have questions about what's happening locally afterwards. So Tracy Dolan, our speaker today, was appointed just in September, or actually August, to be director of the state refugee office, which is part of the agency of human services. Many of us were familiar with her name and her face because she served prior to that for 10 years as deputy commissioner of health. And most recently, COVID, the pandemic response is part of the state leadership team. Prior to her no work with state of Vermont, Tracy worked with international in the field of international public health, primarily focused on HIV AIDS prevention and mitigation, and on maternal and child health in Africa. She also implemented child protection programs in post-conflict zones such as Uganda and Afghanistan. So without any further ado, I'd like to introduce Tracy, and we're very eager to hear from you. Hello, thank you so much for having me. I'm very happy to be here, and I'm glad to be part of your opening after two years of not getting together, so thanks so much for having me. I'm just going to take off my mask if that's okay while I present, but I'll stay far back, and I'm all boosted, so I'm good. So as she said, I am the director of the Vermont State Refugee Office. So I'm going to talk today a little bit about what refugee resettlement looks like, how it is structured in Vermont, the kinds of services that occur with refugee resettlement, the kinds of challenges that refugees face, and what's happening right now with Afghans, and we can talk a little bit about the Ukraine, because I think people also are curious about that. And afterwards, or even during, if you have a question for clarification, you're welcome to ask, I'm very flexible, however you want to do that. And I love this adorable picture. This is the essence of what we're trying to achieve in refugee resettlement, where everyone is together and really living to their best potential, being able to be who they are, but also be part of a new community. So I've got my little clicker here, and I wonder where it is. I point it that way. I point it here. And that bigger agency, and we work out of Waterbury. The mission of my office is to promote and provide a safe and welcoming home for refugees and immigrants, and to promote their full participation as self-sufficient individuals and families in the economic, social, and civic life of Vermont. When I say office, that's a very fancy way of saying me and one other person. So I am the director and I have a refugee health coordinator, and I also have a business support person, but pretty much the two of us programmatically. So obviously we are not actually the ones on the ground doing the work of welcoming people on a day-to-day level. I'll try to describe how that works in a minute, but first let's just talk about what a refugee is. So a refugee is someone who's been forced to flee his or her country of nationality, who is unable or unwilling to return to that country because of persecution based on the person's race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, war, or violence. A refugee has a well-founded fear of persecution and has been forced across national boundaries and someone who cannot return home safely. War and ethnic, tribal, and religious violence are leading causes of refugees fleeing their countries. A refugee may also be referred to as an asylum seeker until granted refugee status. In the U.S., a refugee once admitted may apply in one year for permanent resident status, and so then often they apply for, let's say, a green card, a green card, and eventually or for permanent citizenship. I can talk to you a little bit about what's different about the Afghans in a minute, but I wanted to just share the key here is that refugees are not coming here because they'd like to come here or, hey, you know, maybe I'd like my life to get a little better. It's a dire circumstance and they don't leave by choice. And so they're not unlike sometimes people think, well, they're just coming here because they can make a little more money or have a better economic situation. But it is really quite a desperate situation. I'm just going to play this poem. This woman, Warsan Shire, was the child of refugees and she's a lovely poet and I wanted you to hear what she has to say. Let's see if I can get to her. You only leave home when home won't let you stay. No one leaves home unless home chases you, fire on the feet, hot blood in your belly. And even then you carry the anthem under your breath, only tearing up your passport and airport toilets, sobbing as each mouthful of paper made it clear that you would not be going back. You have to understand that no one would put their children in a boat unless you see it safer than a van. No one burns their palms under trains beneath carriages. No one spends days and nights in the gallbladder of a truck feeding on newspaper unless the miles travel means something more than journey. No one crawls under fences, wants to be beaten, wants to be pitied. No one chooses refugee camps or strip searches where your body is left leaking or prison because prison is safer than a city or fire and one prison guard who looks like your father, no one could take it, could stomach it. No one's skin would be tough enough to go home blacks, refugees, dirty immigrants, asylum seekers, sucking our country dry, niggers with their hands out. They smell strange, savage, messed up their own country and now they want to mess up ours. How do the words and dirty looks run off your back? Maybe it's because the blow is softer than a limb torn off, or the words are more tender than a 14-metre between your legs or the insults are easier to swallow than rubble, than bone, than your child's body and pieces. I want to go home, but hope is the mouth of the shark. Home is the barrel of a gun and no one would leave home unless home chased you to the shore. Unless home told you to pick on your legs, save, be hungry, beg, forget pride. Your survival is more important. No one leaves home unless home is a sweaty voice in your ear, saying, run away from me now. I don't know what has become of it anywhere. Yes. Okay, thank you. Yes. So, Worson Shire award-winning, actually, she won awards for that poem. Beautiful poem, very harsh. Just really emphasizing just how little choice there is and how much trauma there is for people leaving. And I was going to talk to you a little bit. Ha. I lost it again. I'm going to try pressing that button that he told me not to press before. There we go. Okay, good. I pressed it anyway. So, normally, and I'll talk you through this so that you can understand the difference between what's happening with our Afghans. Most people, once they are displaced from their homes, they remain in situations for five years or more. So, for example, I used to work overseas a lot in public health, and I would go into, let's say, Kenya. And there would be refugee camps there, and there would be people in those camps from other countries who literally were living there for a decade. Sometimes even 20 years. So, people having their children in just a temporary camp in another country because that's who was able to take them in. And so, their children go to school there, often living in kind of shacks, but it becomes your life while you wait to get finally resettled somewhere or go back to your home if it becomes safe enough. And so, often, five years or more, the average length of time a person is in a situation, protracted like this, really spread out, and will remain a refugee is 17 years, and less than 1% of refugees will ever be resettled permanently in a new country. So, they're often just temporarily sitting out there and living their whole lives there in some cases. Low and middle income countries host most of the world's refugees. So, you sometimes will hear pushback in a wealthier country that says, you know, why don't, for example, especially when there are challenges in, let's say, countries with a different culture or Muslim countries, there's a sense, well, why don't their Muslim neighbors help them? They do. They're doing most of the helping. So, we do help, and it's a wonderful thing, but we help a very small share of the people who need this help in the world. So, for example, like I said here, most people remain refugees for many, many years. So, what's different about Afghanistan? The difference in Afghanistan was that the US government, because they felt a responsibility for the Afghans there, many of whom worked with US military or other organizations, they felt that responsibility to lift people out. So, those people were instantly kind of refugees, although that's not their exact status, and I'll describe that in a minute. Normally, though, if there's war or anything else happening in another country, people aren't airlifted out, put in a first world country and said, okay, you're refugees now. Normally, they're shifting into other countries, and if they end up here, it's after years and years of applying for visas, showing all their documentation, writing out their story, petitioning to become a refugee, and then often it's like a lottery, really, because most countries can't take everyone in. In the US, for example, they set an amount every year. I notice here that President Biden raised the refugee admissions to 125,000. It went down to a low of 15,000 under President Trump. That's the lowest it's ever been since its inception, so it went up to 125,000. But even that is only a portion of the people who would like to get somewhere, so if somebody's in one of those camps, they will be waiting, and it's just kind of lucky if they find out that they get to go. And so that's how it works for the most part. So, for example, in the Ukraine right now, so we have Putin invading the Ukraine, about 600,000 people have left Ukraine as a result of that already, and they're pouring into neighboring countries. It's unlikely that we would see any Ukrainians if that situation stays that way. If it gets better, most will go home. If that situation stayed that way, it's unlikely we would see any Ukrainians here, probably for years, because normally it takes years and years, so that isn't a situation where the US would say, oh, we did that, we need to airlift them here. Primarily they will go to neighboring countries. If they do seek to be here, they will apply to be refugees, or maybe they will apply for visas if they have relatives here. So, unlikely that we're going to see any incoming Ukrainians, although that could change, but unlikely. The Afghan situation was different because of that sense of responsibility. I can talk a little bit more about what was happening in Afghanistan. I was there in about 2001, so a long time, about 20 years ago, just after the Taliban fell, just after 9-11, so actually January of 2002. The country was very excited about the prospect of freedom. Afghans are very used to getting excited and disappointed, and excited and disappointed because unfortunately they rarely see any kind of long-term peace. There's always somebody coming in to take over, and often the regular people like you and I, and in Afghanistan, just a regular Afghan is probably not benefiting from whoever is coming in. So the Taliban had fallen by the time I arrived in January, and my organization, which was Child's Fund International, many non-governmental organizations like mine were there trying to do what we could to help. So my organization was setting up temporary schools. We were doing child protection work, and the goal of child protection work is to try to quickly develop normalizing activities for children so they're not so impacted by the chaos. So we were setting up schools so that kids would have a regular place to go every day and just be kids. And I found the country to be extraordinary. People were very self-reliant. We did not have a lot of resources to give. We would show up in a community. We would give anyone who could read and write, mostly the men, because the men would say none of the women could read and write, which wasn't true at all. But anyway, we would mostly train a handful of men, usually Mullahs, usually kind of the Muslim leaders. And then we would provide $50 a month and some kind of those beach tatami mats, you know, to lay down on the ground and some balls and some notebooks and some supplies. And that would be it. And then we would come back a little while later and see how it was going. And they would be running their schools like that after just a few days of training. They just took it upon themselves. So they would figure out how to secure things. You know, we never thought about things like security because we weren't giving them much. But when you have nothing and then you get a little something, you have to secure it. But they were very resourceful. And I remember we opened up one small school and we drove back there maybe two months later to see how it was going. And we arrived on a day. So one of the things we helped them do was set up a schedule. And in some countries the idea of a fixed schedule is unusual. So that was actually one of the bigger challenges, the idea of a fixed schedule. And the girls and the boys had to be separate. So girls had to go to school on different days than boys. So we said, okay, the girls will go Tuesday, Thursday. The boys will go Monday, Wednesday. So we arrived on a Tuesday. And we were arriving just at the time that we had suggested that they should start school. And so when we were coming in, we saw all these little girls running toward this small brick building with their little bags, with a pencil and a notebook. And they were running to go to school. And they didn't know we were coming. And it was really the most boring schooling you could imagine, right? The teacher says something, the kids repeat it back. But they were wrapped with attention because they had not had a school in their community before. And I remember at the end we asked the teacher what the challenges were. And he said one of the biggest challenges was getting the girls to leave at the end. Because they were so happy to be there and to have something focused just for them. So they are just like me and you, very proud people. I remember we went to one area that had just been bombed so much during the time of the Taliban and before that the Russians. And they didn't have much. So we would bring snacks with us to share while we did some training. And we were sitting around with mostly men again. And we had a translator. And the men were talking about something. And the translator told us, he said they feel ashamed because you are a guest and you have brought the food and they have no food to offer you. So these are deeply proud, very gracious hosts. They will give you what they have. And they certainly did wonderful work I'm sure for our military there. When you think of people working for the U.S. you might think they're all fluent in English. We thought a lot of them would be when they started arriving. But actually there are people who have jobs that don't require a lot of English. Like mechanics or security guards. So as we have Afghans arriving here now in Vermont we're finding that about 20%, maybe 25% speak English. But many don't. Most of the women don't, although some do. Most of the children don't speak much English. So certainly just like any other refugee arriving we are seeing that there's a strong need for English language learning. And so the nature of the folks arriving, as the U.S. pulled out you saw the pictures on the television of people going to the airport desperate, really risking their lives at that airport to get out. And that's because the Taliban certainly probably had their names on a list if they had anything to do with the U.S. military. And now we are hearing that they're not all getting killed per se but there's certainly a lot of fear. My translator at the time, his name was Abdul his family and he went back last summer for a visit. He's a U.S. citizen and his wife and four daughters have green cards. He left to come home and they were going to follow him a few weeks later but then this happened, this crisis. So they couldn't get to the airport. So for months they were stuck in the capital city, Kabul and they were not leaving their apartment because they are associated with him and he was a translator for the U.S. So whether or not you know your name is on the list there's a great fear. And certainly for women right now some of them, the young girls are allowed to go to school the teenage girls are not anymore. That changed after the U.S. left and the Taliban took over. Some women are allowed to work. Most women are not allowed to work. When I arrived in 2002 the Taliban had just been defeated and I was meeting with two women who were doctors and they were so excited because they had not been able to work as doctors the whole time the Taliban was there and they were so excited to finally be seeing patients. So just a very severe situation especially for women especially for people who have been working with the U.S. or any organization that would be working toward democracy toward Western concepts. So I mentioned that the difference between a refugee and our Afghan arrivals So normally if you're a refugee you arrive we know you're coming months in advance usually you have your papers that say you're a refugee you have all of your ID we can quickly work with you and you get services that the federal government provides but the Afghans they were moved out very quickly and so they have a special status called humanitarian parole. We used the same status when we moved people out of Vietnam who were at risk, humanitarian parole and in that case they arrive either in the U.S. at a military base or maybe they arrive in a neighboring country we still do all the security checks we do the medical screening but they don't have that refugee paper. Now luckily our government said you know what we're going to give them the same services that we would give refugees so the things we would do for refugees we're doing for the humanitarian parolees but the downside is you saw a minute ago that normally they can resettle permanently right? You can see here that the refugees can normally resettle permanently within a year not the humanitarian parolees right now their only path to staying here is to apply for asylum that takes years then once you get asylum then you apply for a green card then you apply to become a permanent resident in the U.S. citizen so if that remains the case that they all have to apply to be assailees that will be probably a 10 year process for them to become citizens it's a huge amount of work we don't have enough lawyers in any state in this country to take on all those cases and the federal government does not have enough judges to deal with all of those cases so what people are asking is that Congress pass an act an Afghan adjustment act to change all of these people from humanitarian parolee to refugee or some kind of permanent status otherwise they're going to be caught in this legal system and the government's going to have a ton of work and all of the states are going to have a ton of work for years and years so that's where we are I can talk a little bit about this is our history so here in Vermont up until 2016 we were getting usually more than 350 every year so from 2008 to 2016 we had more than 300 a year and then we had a change in the federal government in 2017 we had the Trump administration came in and they said very clearly that they want to change the refugee program reduce it and slow it down so you see our numbers starting to drop because remember how I said the president states a number he makes a determination so Biden said 125,000 so the president states a number so when Trump came in he started dropping that number very quickly and that number went down to 15,000 for the whole country and so that's what happened in Vermont you can see so you can see we have people coming from different countries so this is until last year you don't see fiscal year 22 here but plenty from Bhutan from the Congo and these are all places you've probably heard about that have terrible civil war and strife we had many from Somalia as well we had some from Syria and now in FY22 I'll tell you what our numbers are let me see if I can get to our numbers so we have some regular refugees coming from other countries just a few because with this Afghan crisis they put a hold on a lot of those plus COVID and they said okay we're going to work on bringing the Afghans in so currently we have about 220 Afghans I'm calling them refugees here but their actual status is that humanitarian parole so USCRI is the refugee resettlement program in Colchester and they accepted 130 refugees ECDC is a brand new organization up in Bravo Borough ECDC stands for the Ethiopian Community Development Council but it's not about just taking Ethiopians that's just the name so ECDC opened up, took in 90 Afghan refugees and in addition we've had some other refugees arriving from some other countries and so that's where we are I'll talk a little bit about who's arriving we have a lot of big families refugee families tend to be big because they tend to be from countries where the families are much larger but we also have a high number of single men who are still back in Afghanistan and that's because it was a lot of those men who were working with our military so you can see why we would have a higher proportion so they started arriving in Chittenden, Colchester area in about November and up in the Bravo Borough area in about January so usually when a refugee arrives we know they're coming and we have a housing ready for them an apartment or a house that doesn't mean we buy a house for them but we found a house for them but because so many Afghans were arriving so quickly and because it's very hard to find housing right now in Vermont I don't know if you've been hearing about that hard to buy a house, hard to find an apartment that's affordable we did two things one of the things we did and I say we, it's not me I'm just speaking like it was me one thing we did was use host families which we don't usually do for refugees it's better for them to immediately go into their own place but we used host families so a family gets trained a little bit and then they help these people they let them live in their house for a while and help them provide help them with day to day activities and the other thing we did up in Bravo Borough we took a college campus it's called the School for International Training and they actually partnered up there and so every Afghan who arrived went up onto the college campus and they got cultural orientation there some English classes they were able to stay there their food was cooked there and so that's what happened when they first arrived and now we're looking for some longer term housing in the Chittenden area of these 130 about 90% of them we have found long term housing which is pretty amazing even though it's very hard to find housing we have landlords and just regular Vermonters who really wanted to help and who said you know what my place is coming open I'm going to hold on to it because I'd like to help some of these refugees coming in and in Bravo Borough they started arriving later so right now we have about 50% of them this week who will be in permanent long term housing so that's a really great success in many other states in the US they do not have enough housing and so they're keeping them in motels or hotels or in very temporary situations so I feel like we are lucky in Vermont even though our housing is tight employment, the update there probably about I don't know what percentage maybe between 20 and 25% of people are already finding jobs and those are the people who are available to work so if there's a mom with three small children we don't count her as available to work right now but most of the people who are single or head of household about 25% of them are finding work when we found out that the Afghans were coming so many employers called and said we really want to hire them partly because it feels like a good thing to do, partly because there are a lot of jobs that you cannot find people to work for yes you can yeah, refugees get to work right away they have employment authorization and parolees have employment authorization but if you're seeking asylum you don't have any status so you can't work until you get asylum oh it's too bad so I should mention that for the Afghan parolees they were given employment authorization which means they can work as soon as they arrive so they're not like a usual asylum seeker I'm just going to hold on to this because it's tricky to and so that's what's happening with employment now we're learning through research that speaking English is one of the most important parts of getting a job that's good and moving up in your job so we're really emphasizing the importance of not only taking English lessons when you come if you need them but really continuing it because if you get into a job at entry level and your English doesn't get much better it's really hard to move up but if your English gets better you can quickly move to a supervisory position so some of the jobs that people are going into are factory jobs some of them go into janitorial work up at the hospitals for example but then we have people showing up who are very educated we have somebody here who's an accountant he used to work for JP Morgan as a consultant in Afghanistan so we're looking maybe in our tax department is there a high level job we have other people who worked in hospitals or healthcare so one of them got a job at Dartmouth Hitchcock so we're definitely trying to get people into the right level if you're ready for this we don't want to put you here just because there's a quick job available we'd rather wait a little bit and try to get you into the most money you can make yes would it be possible since many of them were brought here because they worked with the military could help them have a resume saying that they're a good worker what they did and help them help on the job you know some of them do that on their own so the question was can the military get them a resume the military probably doesn't have the capacity to work individual by individual but some of them do have reference letters our military were so passionate about helping some of these guys get out by the way I was getting calls from national guardsmen here who said I'm going to cry about this but five years ago he's such a great person what can I do to get him out and absolutely willing to write letters so some of them probably do have letters of reference things like that so it's less about that and more about now just do they have the English ability and can we find them the right job absolutely but the military and I would say our guardsmen here have just been wonderful in trying to help and then all the employers I mean normally when refugees come in you do get some portion of the population who don't like it it feels different they look different are they taking our resources away but in this case because so many of them were associated with helping our military I think it made some people feel better who might have otherwise been feeling threatened about it so we've had literally nothing but a positive response which has been wonderful so positive response from employers from landlords within state government our secretary of agriculture Anson Tevin he called me and said what can I do and so I said well the meat they eat halal meat they're Muslim so the meat we have in most of our stores won't work and to get halal meat in New York or Rhode Island or Pennsylvania and he wrote me back he said I'm on it and a few weeks later he and I and the president of the Islamic society in Chittenden we all sat down he explained to us how people try to get their meat now and what the challenges are and so now the agriculture is going to ask for money from the federal government to try to increase the production of halal meat here so maybe a few farms one day a week will have their meat slaughtered in the halal way so that that's probably not how you say it so that it is permitted by Islam it's not actually anything very different it's just a prayer and a slightly different way of slaughtering but that's the culture and if you can do it that way then that meat would be available it sounds like a small thing but it's huge so if you're driving in a country and realizing that most of the places don't have the food that your religion would allow you to eat it's big so the more we can do even on that front everybody wants to help it's been wonderful and then schools so once people get here if they have kids you want them to get into school right away now if they're in a host family and we don't know where they're going to be long term we'll wait a little bit because we don't want them to start a school in Barry and then find out they're going to be actually living in Montpelier so we want them to be in the school that they're going to be in long term and some of the schools have great programs so if you arrive as a five year old and you guys know this because little kids are amazing they are speaking English in a year they put those kids in they do a little bit of a little bit of English language learning but by the end of the year those kids are ready to go into first grade with everybody else but you arrive in high school 15, 16 that's harder so they have some programs where the kids go half day all year in an English language learning environment and then the other half day with their peers so it's hard but young people are resilient and they figure it out and then health and mental health so when somebody arrives here they need to get their first medical exam and it's called a domestic health screening and it checks for everything it checks for all the infectious diseases and it checks for mental health so the people leaving Afghanistan in some ways it's even harder than if you were a refugee for years before you got here it's such a rapid transition these people went from living like you and I they've got their house, their kids go to school it might not have been great but they had their life and then suddenly within a month nobody expected that the Taliban would take over that quickly and so suddenly they're pulled out and they leave and so there are people arriving here who came from a village and have never been in a different environment there are people arriving here who had a very good life in a city and now they're out in let's say Bennington and it's just very different so it's a really big adjustment and it's hard because if you arrive here as a refugee unless you're coming in high skilled you're going to be poor for a while that's just how it is you probably have a big family you're gonna get a job for $16 an hour probably your oldest child will also get a job for $16 an hour rent is outrageous and you're not going to have a lot of extra money so it's a tough adjustment not everyone stays like that people move out of it but to be very realistic it is a tough lifestyle for a while and I'm going to talk to you about what we do to help with that yes do you have any asylum seekers and refugees please refugees arrive here with status that allows them to apply to become a permanent resident an asylum seeker is someone who came here without the blessing of the US government or without the blessing of any agency they basically figured out a way to get in and then they presented themselves and I don't know all the details of the legality of it they don't have any benefits so if they arrive as an asylum seeker we do give them some benefits in the state of Vermont but they are not eligible for any of the refugee services because they have not been blessed by the refugee resettlement program nationally I probably can't give you a lot more than that I need some resources yes do asylum seekers can I think in Vermont I don't think federally they're required to but Vermont is very generous asylum seekers get medicated if they apply I think yes wearing the masks for COVID no a lot of them are actually used to it in their own countries too but I will say let me just talk through the benefits that the Afghans and regular refugees get so that you have a sense of what they normally get so core services so when they arrive and this is for refugees including getting the same services as other refugees and by the way we don't have a lot of asylum seekers in Vermont we do have a handful but not a lot so core services for refugees they get employment services that means the refugee agency make sure that they get some kind of training on employment because their culture might be very different so arriving at a certain time leaving at a certain time calling in sick and then learning the job connecting them with the employer helping them get a job helping them fill out the application so employment services they get assistance with housing so the resettlement agency will help them find housing and help them figure out the lease they get a one-time payment for basic needs so every individual not every family every individual is allocated $1,225 and the resettlement agency keeps that and pays for things directly and gives some of it directly but it's all meant to be spent on each individual so for one single person coming in that doesn't last very long for a family of six you've got $8 or $9,000 that might last a little bit longer so there is a myth out there that people say this when they're frustrated because maybe they are struggling but there's a myth that the US government gives refugees all this money they don't they even $1,225 which is helpful then cash assistance so basically if you are a lower income you can apply for reach up have you ever heard of that it's kind of like it's like a welfare type of program for lower income people and it gives them other services helps them find work etc so most of the refugees who come in can apply for reach up if they are a mom or a dad or they're pregnant but if you come in as a single you don't qualify for reach up reach up is for families so if you come in as a single person the refugee program my program kicks in and gives you what you would get in reach up but it's called refugee cash assistance so basically anyone who comes in gets it's about $550 a month for the first five to eight months to help them get on their feet find a job the goal of refugee resettlement even though the goal of my office is live a wonderful long prosperous life the goal of refugee resettlement very specifically is economic self-sufficiency so the idea is to come in find work and be self-sufficient and it is the number one desire of every refugee it's their first question when can I work they are desperate to work when you go through the refugee process and you lose a lot of control and what you want to do is feel like I can stand on my own two feet you want dignity, you want some control you want your own money of course medical assistance most refugees are eligible for Medicaid pretty much all of them if they weren't some assistance would be provided but they're all eligible pretty much in Vermont and they get a primary care provider a doctor after that a regular doctor so those are the kinds of support services that occur any questions on the kind of services they get and I'm sorry I don't have all the answers on asylum seekers so much yes, so reach up that application includes the food assistance so they can get food stamps or SNAP as it's called in Vermont and they can get that again up to the first five to eight months as well and then longer if they are eligible on the previous slide of the numbers I thought it might be interesting for this prevention the one where you were showing where people are 30 of as I have to say 30 of the Afghan living muscular yes, you're right you mentioned you're right, let me just go there so I said 130 we're assigned to USCRI but you're right 30 are in Montpelier we've got some in Rutland so I'll talk through that, let me just go through that so when refugees come in they are assigned to a refugee resettlement agency and usually people have to live within 50 miles of that agency but because of the Afghan crisis the government said we're going to loosen that a little bit so even though your agency is here they could live farther away from you so in the case of the Chittenden and this area, central area some people are living in Chittenden you're right 30 are living in Montpelier and then we have families also settling in Rutland as well and I think USCRI opened a small office in Rutland because they plan to continue that there, yeah and I don't know a lot about what's happening in Montpelier but if you have any updates that would be great one thing about the idea is to have a critical mass of people so that there is a community yes, that critical mass is really important if we don't have groups that are big enough, they leave so in the past in Vermont when we have tried to settle families outside of the Chittenden area they didn't stay, they left within months and that happens everywhere and that's because they don't feel like they have community so in this case in Montpelier let's do a few families and let's have it with the same language so they're more likely to stay same within the Brattleboro area a lot of calls came to my office from a lot of towns in Vermont saying we're ready, we want to take families and they said why can't you send families to us well first of all we don't have a resettlement agency there and it's a lot of work and we can't just do that, it's not up to us the federal state department decides where families go but the second thing is sending one family here and there it's unlikely that will work there's not enough services and they will most likely leave which isn't good for that family and it's not great for the community because they don't stay so thank you for that that critical mass is a tricky one for Eid I'm sure they get together sometimes on Zoom but I don't know much about what they're doing yet so that's kind of new but I'm guessing going to prayers on Friday is a pretty core activity so that would be a place they might also connect thank you and we have amazing volunteers in the Burlington area we have one woman who cooks the first meal for everyone who arrives at the airport isn't that amazing even if it's a family of nine she brings out all the food to go plates and she gives it to whoever the host family is so that they have culturally appropriate food so when they go back home their first meal they can trust that it's halal food and she does that every time a family arrives and doesn't want any money for it because she was a refugee that's what we get we get a lot of people another woman who was a refugee here from Bosnia she came when she was six years old and a few weeks ago I went out to the airport and I met a family and we all went to this woman's house and she was holding the hand of another six-year-old little Afghan girl and she said I was you I know and so she did very well here so they have an extra house that they rent out so she just immediately brought them to that home they're going to be renting that beautiful home it was lovely all around the house and the kids the two little ones couldn't speak English but every time we opened a new door they would look in the room and say yes they were so happy so yeah it's amazing when you've been through it I can imagine you really want to help others so that's wonderful yes I think they interact the families are assigned to USCRI and then the local action groups then become the on the ground arm for day to day but maybe I'll pause and see if somebody has a better explanation there yeah I'll repeat back so her local organization does work with USCRI USCRI will let them know sometimes with very short notice a family is arriving and this local organization will help them find a host family locate food maybe even organize transportation for them to go to their appointments so the local action groups that are helping are working with either USCRI or ECDC yeah USCRI stands for the US Commission of Refugee I'm not positive what you are but it's the Refugee Resettlement Agency in Colchester and ECDC is the Ethiopian community development council that's the refugee agency in Brattleboro we only have two and two is plenty yes yes yeah so in the case of ECDC they have a slightly different model for community support they have something called community sponsorship so a group of people come together they raise some money and they become basically like a community group that supports the family it's called community sponsorship so that four or five people or four or five families almost surround like a form a net around a family and they all take on different roles but it's the same idea that kind of community family support volunteer and then the donations you need so many things when you arrive of course furniture and clothing and ideally money so that people can choose their own things you know so it is great of course that they can go in and pick out what they need from a warehouse but even better if a mother can bring her daughter to a store and her daughter can actually pick out her own coat again the dignity that you need back after such a difficult time yes yeah that's a tough one it's pretty hard so the question is if somebody comes here single or even if part of the family comes and what about the rest of their family stuck in Afghanistan the reality is if they're not out right now it's likely going to be quite a while before they can get out because they did remove almost everyone who had a visa and they removed all the US citizens and all the green card holders and then they removed all these other people that we're calling humanitarian parolees there are other people there who would probably qualify as a humanitarian parolee but I don't think the US government right now is prioritizing doing that I think they're doing it little by little but I know many of the Afghans who arrived are very hopeful that their families will come and we are trying to temper those expectations because we are not sure we are not hearing that there's going to be another mass evacuation so that's very difficult so many of them are wanting to send money home and there's not a lot of money yes yeah you know I don't have much I don't have much background on it I know what you know probably about climate refugees I don't know much more about it no no no they don't qualify under the UN definition of a refugee maybe it would probably if you are leaving because of a natural disaster you can be a refugee so I don't know if it would be a new category or if simply climate drives some natural disasters and if you have to leave because of a hurricane or because you were devastated by something you would be a refugee anyway okay yes so when people left Afghanistan in August some of them went to European countries and some of them came directly to the US bases but some of them jumped twice so they went to Europe and then they came to the bases we have closed almost all of the US bases so they're empty so I think we resettled about 75,000 Afghans here but there are still more out in some European countries now there's a phase two and we're bringing some of them in and they will probably start arriving into communities in mid-April but not a large number probably in the lower thousands so we might see 20 or 30 more here in Vermont as an example but there might be more out there I don't know I know some of them coming from Europe will arrive here at the end of March and probably here in Vermont maybe later in April try to work it out with the authorities there Canada is getting their own so every country is getting their own so I don't know what the number was in Canada but if there's a phase two they will also get their own in Canada as well yeah and then the mental health piece some people have had tremendous trauma some of them may have already been captured by the Taliban or tortured or imprisoned may not have been the trauma of leaving so quickly and then they were stuck on those military bases with nothing to do for months and not knowing where they were going to go not knowing if their family was okay so mental health is a pretty big deal and we provide mental health services many people in other cultures when they come at first they don't think about phrases like mental health they just said do you have a mental health problem they might think you're saying are you crazy so they're going to say no no I don't need that so we have to think about different ways of asking like do you feel sad lots of people might say that or do you feel stressed out and those are easier ways for us to find out and then to get them the help they need several years ago I'll just go back here to the stories who showed up and from what we could see they were doing fine and within a couple of years there was a big movement of suicide in the Bhutanese community all over the US around the same time so somehow we did not understand what was happening so we must have been using the wrong approach or maybe there's nothing we could do I don't know but we had suicides here in Vermont the Bhutanese arrived they seemed stable they're very friendly, very smiley but there was a level of stress going on and so at that point we said the federal government put more money into mental health and said we have to do more mental health screening but the challenge is we can't do it when they just arrive we have to go back months later because that's when it gets stressful again you're working you've got kids they're costing you $2,000 a month you know it's stressful so we need to go back and go back and go back and be checking on mental health and see what we can do counseling is one part of it but probably even more important is getting people together from their own community doing things they like to do a counselor can help you when you're down but even better is when you get together to do something that you like to do and so sometimes our mental health work might involve getting the women together to cook for example so I talked a little bit about the support services they get some training and job development they can get vocational training job placement we don't do a lot of job maintenance and that's something we should do more of like once people have a job we haven't put a lot of time into figuring out upgrading so we're going to try to do a little more of that and then social adjustment, English language gotta keep pushing the English in order to get benefits like reach up like refugee cash assistance you have to take at least 12 hours of English a month when you arrive for at least 8 months but honestly more would be better because it's going to help you in the long run and then interpretation it's very tricky Dari and Pashto not all of them speak both and when they arrive we don't have a lot of Afghans living in Vermont so we didn't have people who were ready to interpret so when a new population arrives we often hire some of them right away so if they can speak pretty good English and of course their local language we'll hire them as interpreters but it's tough at first because we just don't have enough interpreters and every you go to the bank, you need an interpreter you go to the doctor, you need an interpreter you go enroll in school, you need an interpreter so it's tricky and then the support services includes day care for kids and citizenship classes for refugees hopefully these Afghans will have a change in their status so we can eventually move towards citizenship with regard to the interpretation every hospital or health care practice if they get any federal money at all like Medicaid they are required to provide translation by law but it's usually through the phone because of course they don't have people sitting in the back ready to speak all these languages unless you're in a city where you have that population so they'll call up a phone service and they'll get someone to translate but that's really hard because maybe you can't quite understand you don't see the body language maybe that person who is speaking Dari is speaking a slightly different kind of Dari so it's hard there's not an easy solution for that but we keep working on it but that's the complaint right now there's a bunch of complaints right now but that's one of them we don't have them and then the other problem with the Afghans arriving so quickly they don't have identification they didn't get the refugee papers because they're not refugees a lot of them didn't have their passports because they just ran so they don't have some of them don't have enough ID so they go to the bank to open up a bank account and the bank says I can't open a bank account for you now we because we're in Vermont and we're small up in Brattleboro they met with a bank there and the bank said okay we'll figure it out and here and I don't know so much about the Montpelier area but sometimes if you have a personal relationship they will sit down and explain it and I mean it's not a lot of money they're on the hook for it they're not bringing in a lot so those are the numbers so we talked about some of the challenges transportation and in Vermont that's a tough one right we do not have a great transportation system we're not like a big city where you can jump on the subway or you know so it's already hard if you're lowering come in Vermont even if you're a Vermonter even harder if you're a refugee some communities get together and try to buy you know maybe a cheap car to help people to start out but there's insurance and you have to learn how to drive they try to place people and house people in a place where they could at least walk or take the bus but then getting to your job is tricky you know because those factory jobs are sometimes out of town so sometimes the job might have a bus service but it's not an easy solution isolation that's why we try to get people together and then the cultural acclamation you know the culture that the Afghans are coming from for example is very different you know the relationship between men and women are very different the male is clearly the head of the household and the woman is clearly meant to be home but in our culture that's not necessarily how it is so to encourage the woman to come out to activities the man might think why is she doing that and the woman might be less likely to speak up and say I would like to go so it's tricky and then we have very clear rules about you can't hit your kids you can't hit your wife but in some countries it's absolutely acceptable to do that and so we have to be very clear when people arrive here the rules here are like this and if you break them they could take your children from you and so it's a terrible thing to have to say right away here we might take your children from you but we have to be that clear because we would hate to see that happen and it's avoidable so some of the education early on is things like that other cultural differences some people coming from other countries their children are very polite compared to what we might think about children very respectful they don't talk back they don't raise their voice and when you arrive here and you see children maybe yelling at the teacher maybe swearing in front of a parent and the parents from these other countries they don't like that so they don't want their kids around that so what do you do right you're looking at your child going to school and you say I don't want my kid to come back and become like that I like this part of my culture so it's a lot how do you keep things that feel very good and how do you change the things that don't work in this culture yes we're not aware of any cultural affirmation courses at all for the folks who live here and we're concerned about it for the same reasons you were describing that safety safety is probably the biggest concern that we've seen in terms of you don't realize it and please see it how obsessed we as a society are with safety and kids riding on the handle two-year-old riding on the handlebars three-year-old stuff like that neighbors call and say but from a preventive perspective it seems like that's really important and I know it's required at USC but how do we make sure that in fact they have those opportunities because we don't as in the community we don't want to be the safety police or the cultural affirmation police one thing we are doing now for example I reached out to the police and to the department of children and families and they're going to put together some seminars or webinars on some of the other issues I mentioned so how you act between men and women what's acceptable, what's acceptable within a house things like physical safety I don't know I'm a little bit new I just started in September so I don't know if that's already out there but you're right the cultural differences there are very different they're probably more like we all where I grew up in late 60's early 70's it's really more that style where you just good luck hang on to a handlebar and hope for the best so it's actually probably a little more familiar to some of us but certainly the younger parents they're probably horrified when they see kids doing you're not necessarily hanging on to your kids hand the whole time if you're from another country your kid might wander out a little bit because you're not used to busy roads so that's a good question I don't have an easy answer but that is something to think about how do you get those safety now some of it just happens naturally you look around, you do what other people are doing and that brings more safety and we really want to get ahead of issues that could make the community turn against a population so anything we can do to get people acclimated appropriately because all it takes is one incident for some people in the community to suddenly change their feelings about a group so it's really important to try to get that education out there soon do you have thoughts on how to teach safety? No I'm raising as one example I mean in those are the workplace behavior of the workplace between men and women and all that I mean again we're concerned from a preventive point of view I just was wondering how that's going how and when that's going to be the focus of these folks who've been here for three months we've got a bunch of people starting work next week because it seems like it's not too early I think USCRI has a workplace course and I don't know if these guys are taking it yet okay all right so that's good thank you, I'll check into that and then just the goal is economic self-sufficiency the stated goal of the refugee resettlement program nationally and so that's part of Governor Scott is very supportive of refugees and these refugees are a great thing to do but B we really need to grow our workforce in Vermont we have a vacancy issue and so it's been very helpful and they really do enter all kinds of occupations here's a couple of our more recent new Vermonters refugee men participate in the labor force at rates as high or higher than native born men and refugee women eventually get there after 10 years and more refugees become entrepreneurs than even American born people so this is a population that wants to work they want to be entrepreneurs and here's some examples of organizations that were started by immigrants, Google, Whatsapp, PayPal all started by immigrants here in the US I'm going to pause there and see if there's any more questions okay I think we're ready to go thank you very much