Every Campus a Refuge-Wake Forest University
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We welcome and partner with refugee families, working as a campus community to prepare them for school, work, and life in Winston-Salem.
We are a team of of faculty, staff, students through SAFAR (Students Association for the Advancement of Refugees) , and community members that provide ESL tutoring, driving lessons, transportation to medical appointments, team mentoring for career and job placement, among many other things from the trivial, to the critical.
We operate through many, many hours of volunteers’ time, in-kind support from Wake Forest University, and we get by with small fundraisers here and there. But we have come up against several significant bills as we work with several families, none of whom have the capacity to pay these bills, so we need to raise money to keep helping these families.
We take advantage of social service programs, and church/nonprofit clothes closets or food pantries, but sometimes there are specific needs that cannot be met these ways, and we need a small fund to help the families.
Here are some examples of recent expenses we are trying to cover:
$300 covers the cost of a moving a new family into and out of a house
$60 to buy new bedding and towel set
Clothes for children
School supplies
Medications
Medical payments
Car repairs
Our goal is to take the refugee narrative beyond the image of flight to the reality of resettlement in small-town America. We hope to show that at some point, families stop being “refugees” and instead become “neighbors,” whose culture and identities are valuable assets to the American community. Through the Every Campus a Refuge program at Wake Forest, we have created a new vision of what an American college campus and American community can look like.
We are a team of of faculty, staff, students through SAFAR (Students Association for the Advancement of Refugees) , and community members that provide ESL tutoring, driving lessons, transportation to medical appointments, team mentoring for career and job placement, among many other things from the trivial, to the critical.
We operate through many, many hours of volunteers’ time, in-kind support from Wake Forest University, and we get by with small fundraisers here and there. But we have come up against several significant bills as we work with several families, none of whom have the capacity to pay these bills, so we need to raise money to keep helping these families.
We take advantage of social service programs, and church/nonprofit clothes closets or food pantries, but sometimes there are specific needs that cannot be met these ways, and we need a small fund to help the families.
Here are some examples of recent expenses we are trying to cover:
$300 covers the cost of a moving a new family into and out of a house
$60 to buy new bedding and towel set
Clothes for children
School supplies
Medications
Medical payments
Car repairs
Our goal is to take the refugee narrative beyond the image of flight to the reality of resettlement in small-town America. We hope to show that at some point, families stop being “refugees” and instead become “neighbors,” whose culture and identities are valuable assets to the American community. Through the Every Campus a Refuge program at Wake Forest, we have created a new vision of what an American college campus and American community can look like.
Organizer
Sara Pesek
Organizer
Winston-Salem, NC