Getting started (Jan 2024)
We’ll be sharing briefs on our monthly progress here to help track our journey, share lessons learned, and provide resources for others who might want to help. In December 2023, we got together and started our work. We knew we wanted to work with Alight but none of us had experience with the US State Department’s Welcome Corps program. We met monthly and shared emails on our thoughts and how we might get funding and get started. Alight was very helpful in answering our initial questions about what to expect. By the end of January 2024, we
- Set up a shared Google doc to track our meetings, availability, goals, and useful links
- Set up a bank account to track donations
- Registered a domain and secured hosting with Dreamhost
- Aligned on our goals, discussed nonprofit status, and how we’d organize work.
So who are these refugees, anyway? Some have been waiting in refugee camps for years. Some helped the U.S. military in their home country. The Welcome Corps FAQ provides some background:
Refugees are individuals outside of the United States who have been forced to flee their home countries due to persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. If they cannot return home or locally integrate within the country to which they fled, some refugees may be permanently resettled to another country like the United States.
The first refugees that arrived in the United States through the Welcome Corps were from Sub-Saharan Africa. The Welcome Corps is now able to match private sponsor groups with refugees from all over the world who are approved for resettlement to the United States through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP).
Through the Welcome Corps, you will support individuals who the U.S. government has approved for resettlement to the United States through the USRAP. Refugees are referred for resettlement when resettlement is their best possible long-term solution—meaning they cannot return home and do not have any prospects for local integration in the country to which they fled. All refugees admitted through the USRAP, including refugees supported through the Welcome Corps, must complete thorough security vetting and health screening before coming to the United States. Only those refugee applicants who are cleared through an extensive security vetting process, including vetting by U.S. government law enforcement and intelligence agencies, are approved for resettlement to the United States.
https://welcomecorps.org/resources/faqs/
~ Kevin
Standing up MWC (Feb 2024)
In February, we focused on setting up a nonprofit in WI. We decided to pursue this to open up opportunities for corporate matches and help stretch our budget via the tax benefits available to non-profits. We set up a registered agent – a service that is available for official notices and mailings. We also filed articles of incorporation with the state of Wisconsin.
~ Kevin
Submitting our application (Mar 2024)
In March, we submitted our application with Welcome Corps, authorized background checks as part of that application, and completed the Sponsorship Essentials Training. The training provides a great overview of sponsorship and helped us think and discuss how we might deal with unexpected challenges like a refugee wanting to move during the 90-day sponsorship period. We collected dozens of useful links for cultural orientation, aid programs, medical resources, and housing tips. The Initial Sponsor Checklist from Welcome Corps is a great summary of the priorities each week. The Journey Guide has even more detail.
Other key steps this month:
- Started building this website
- Filed for 501(c)(3) status
- Connected with Four Lakes Welcome Corps, another local group who is sponsoring their own refugee group.
- Started setting up donation platforms
~ Kevin
Things get moving quickly (Apr 2024)
A few weeks after our application was submitted, Welcome Corps sent us a survey asking about preferences for matching. We were open to sponsoring up to three refugees but didn’t indicate any restrictions on origin, language, or anything else since we hoped to support the greatest need. Within two days of submitting the survey, we were matched with a refugee from Venezuela. We learned 65% of Venezuelan refugees make the journey for a better life alone! As of April 2024, 7.7 million Venezuelans have left for a better life, 6.6 million of whom live in Latin America and the Caribbean. Venezuelan migrants boosted Colombia’s economy by USD 529.1 million in 2022 (source.)
We took a break for the Wisconsin Film Festival together and caught the screening of a powerful and stirring film about journeying for a better life, Io Capitano.
Two weeks after being matched, we received an Advanced Booking Notification (ABN) the notice of the planned flight details and an arrival date three weeks out, in May. Alight tells us this might change and we should wait to confirm housing until about a week before the flights. We shifted our meetings to weekly and started joining Alight’s weekly meetings and connecting with other sponsors.
We learned that the UN ‘s International Organization for Migration (IOM) arranges the travel for the refugees and issues a no-interest loan for the refugee to pay back. This helps stretch program funds and helps refugees establish credit and budgets in their new lives.
Housing can be expensive and we were grateful and relieved to learn that their are short-term rental partners who donate housing for the first month. It will help immensely to be able to find safe housing that is near where the newcomer might work and take English classes.
Since we have a small group, we decided not to split the work by subject area. We set up a free Trello board and began working out of Trello instead of a shared Google doc.
A few of our members started brushing up on their Spanish while others focused on organizing our information. Here’s a glance at our Trello board:
~ Kevin
Arrival month! (May 2024)
We are very grateful for Airbnb’s housing program that will house the newcomer for their first month. This gives us much-needed time to focus on cultural and community orientation, enrollment in benefits and classes, and finding employment and housing that fit our newcomer’s needs.
The six weeks between being matched and arrival are flying by. We continued to break down work in Trello, connected with local resources, set up fundraisers, and compiled our key resources on a new page to help others (and ourselves) navigate the constellations of organizations eager to help.
We are excitedly planning the airport pickup, safety orientation to the housing, binder full of resources in Spanish (e.g. emergency medical info, Wisconsin Drivers Handbook), and welcoming with a delicious meal from La Taguara,
While we pooled together our funds to ensure we could get the application in to support an arrival in the summer, we still expect to need additional funds for housing (renters without US credit or job history often have to pay a premium in addition to hefty security deposits.) Our newcomer has construction experience but many construction jobs require workers to have their own reliable transportation since public transit does not reliably reach many sites in southern Wisconsin. Any help you can provide is deeply appreciated!
~ Kevin, May 7th, 2024
Wow! Quite a few exciting things have happened these last couple weeks for MWC!
Thanks to our wonderful community, we met our fundraising goal in a little over a week!
Everything went smoothly and the individual we are sponsoring arrived last week and is settling in to his temporary housing. He’s been busy applying for benefits, shopping for food and clothes, going to appointments, learning the bus system and exploring Madison on foot. Highlights include going to a very welcoming church service this weekend and meeting other people from Venezuela.
We look forward to supporting him this week to connect with community leaders, get a phone plan, get a bike, start applying to jobs, look for long-term housing and register for English classes.
As we have learned more, we have added a few items to our Sign-Up Genius including bike safety supplies and clothing with sizes, so please check it out!
~ Jennifer
Into his own apartment (June 2024)
Our newcomer moved out of the Airbnb and into a studio apartment in a neighborhood with many Spanish-speaking residents, service providers and businesses. His apartment is well-furnished, thanks to generous donations on our Sign-Up Genius. If you can help, please check it again. He needs a few more things for his apartment and we’re planning ahead for when he’ll need fall and winter clothing and boots.
He has started English classes, is working on the job search, continues to attend church twice a week, and is exploring his new surroundings, now on bike, as well as by foot and bus. While there continue to be lots of tasks to take care of, things are going well, and our newcomer is grateful for the tremendous community support.
~ Mari
We received his Employment Authorization Document about 30 days after he arrived. We had been eagerly anticipating this since we learned, to our surprise, that he had no passport. This has made progressing in documentation challenging – he could not complete a change of address form with the USPS, he could not apply for a REAL ID-compliant Wisconsin State ID, and he effectively had no US-issued photo ID for everyday use.
Every move for a refugee in the US means they have to file a new AR-11 with USCIS within 10 days so we took care of that. We have had a few challenges getting his Access WI account set up but look forward to using that and trying out the app to help track benefits soon. We heard from the WI State Refugee Coordinator and look forward to sharing our experience with them soon. We also heard from our partner Alight about a pilot opportunity for a forum for Welcome Corps Private Sponsor Groups. We’re excited to see the program continue to mature!
On the admin side, we made progress in setting up business accounts, received our Certificate of Exempt Status from the State of Wisconsin, and registered on Benevity.org to enable corporate match donations.
We still haven’t received directions for the required 30-day report for our private sponsor group but we did receive one from pairity.ca asking to connect with our newcomer on his experience.
~ Kevin
The Job Hunt (July 2024)
July was another busy month for our team and for the newcomer!
Now well-settled into his new apartment, the newcomer’s big focus this month has been on searching and applying for jobs. In addition to our team of 5, there are multiple agencies and resources that have been assisting his search. He regularly visits Centro Hispano, Latino Academy, Catholic Multicultural Center, and of course his Dane County case manager to learn about new job opportunities and get more assistance filling in applications. We’ve connected him with local staffing agencies and labor unions. And he’s been applying to jobs online and hitting the pavement as well, asking for work at fast food restaurants and the like.
We’re all very proud of him, but it is challenging to see him working so hard and not having success in the job hunt. As we’ve talked with family, friends, and local business owners, we’ve learned that there are a ton of people who only speak Spanish in the Madison area who are looking for work right now. If you know of a job (that doesn’t require driving) that might be a fit, please let us know!
Fortunately, there are many job training programs the newcomer is eligible for, and we expect he’ll be fully enrolled in one of them soon. We hear people are often hired out of these programs, so we are keeping our fingers crossed!
Because our commitment to the Welcome Corps program is to try to help the newcomer achieve self-sufficiency, we’ve started to give him more space to take ownership of the multitude of challenges of everyday life in America. He has a budget ready for when he will begin paying his own rent, utilities, phone, internet, and other bills. He’s now quite comfortable using the “Lens” feature of the Google Translate app to take pictures of any mail he receives that is in English, and then read it himself in Spanish. He’s also gotten comfortable using Google Maps, so he can get just about anywhere in town by himself. And he even joined his church group on a trip to Minneapolis! We’re delighted he’s finding community and exploring more of this country.
We continue to learn more about the challenges of the immigration system in the U.S. There is a lot of conflicting and confusing information about the proper processes. We are happy to be connected with the immigration specialists at Centro Hispano, and with Leidi Perez’s LP Immigration Paralegal LLC services.
We are now focusing our energies on ensuring we execute on our checklist of required items before the program ends in just a little over 2 weeks!
~ Alana
Forward! (August 2024)
This is it! The last day of Madison Welcome Corp’s 90-day commitment to help resettle a refugee in Madison. While some of our team will continue to meet regularly with him, this marks the beginning of a new era for the newcomer. He’ll now officially be responsible for navigating his own benefits, paying his own bills, and continuing to settle in to his new life in Wisconsin.
We are all so grateful for the overwhelming support from our friends, family, and greater community throughout this whole process. The program certainly has had its ups and downs. But we all agree we have learned a great deal, and we are all happy we have been able to give a refugee an opportunity for a better life that he would otherwise not have had.
In addition to continuing his English classes, job search, and church services, this month the newcomer enjoyed bike rides, dinner with friends, and even a Mallards game – he loves baseball! He also loves fishing, and thanks to generous donors he now has supplies for it, and is set up to get his fishing license.
Unsurprisingly, the current tumult in Venezuela has been very hard on the newcomer. We are grateful Dane County provides lots of resources for people struggling with challenging experiences. Unfortunately, we’ve learned that the bureaucracy in our state still makes accessing all those resources virtually impossible for a non-English speaker (and even extremely difficult for those of us who are native English speakers!)
In short, despite its challenges, we are grateful for having had this incredible opportunity to welcome a refugee to our great city and state. We couldn’t have done it without our generous supporters like you! We wish the newcomer success on this next leg of his journey, and trust that he’ll embrace the spirit of Wisconsin’s motto: “Forward!”
~ Alana
Supporting refugees in Madison, WI
