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HUSSEY-SLONIKER: Welcome to the AmeriCorps Research and 

Evaluation Dialogue 2022. My name is Katy HusseySloniker and I’m the Learning Officer for the Office 

of Research and Evaluation. Before we begin Day 2 of 

the Convening, we’d like to cover a few housekeeping 

items. First, thank you all for your patience as we 

get started with Zoom events. If you have any 

questions or experience technical difficulties please 

us know using the chat box feature. 

 This session will be recorded and posted online on 

the AmeriCorps Impact Webinar page within two weeks 

of the close of the session. Each session will be 

available on the AmeriCorps YouTube channel under the 

Research and Evaluation playlist as well. There is no 

dial-in phone line for our Zoom event today. All 

audio is broadcast over the internet using your 

computer speakers. All participants have been muted 

to avoid background noise and to allow for greater 

engagement. 

 You will be in listen only mode throughout the 

session. You can ask questions at any time during the 
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presentation through the chat box. Select Everyone 

when submitting your questions. A member of our ORE 

team will be compiling the questions and reading them 

during the Q&A portion of the session. Finally, 

closed captioning is available. To activate captions 

please select the Live Transcrip’s icon on the Zoom 

menu and select Show Subtitles. 

 That takes care of our housekeeping items and now for 

today’s agenda. Today’s Dialogue session is focused 

on foundational research for fostering civic 

participation for refugee communities. We’ll hear a 

brief welcome from Dr. Andrea Robles, AmeriCorps 

Office of Research and Evaluation. Watch a three 

minute video discussing how AmeriCorps translates 

research into action. Followed by introductions and 

later a facilitated discussion on the presentations 

by Doctors Emily McDonald and Victoria Narine. And 

finally, reflections from our senior leaders on 

applying and translating this research into practice. 

 As a reminder, we have one more day of speakers 

presenting their research to inform actionable and 
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meaningful change from national service. Thursday 

will focus on African American youth and civic 

engagement. If you have not already done so and would 

like to register for the final day of the dialogue, 

please see the link in the chat box. And now our 

research dialogue Embracing the Diversity of Civic 

Engagement will start. Here to welcome us is Dr. 

Andrea Robles. 

DR. ROBLES: Thank you, Katy. And welcome everyone. We’re 

so excited to have you join us and to hear another 

wonderful day of great speakers. These are our 

research grantees that we have funded and do research 

around our mission statement of civic engagement, 

volunteering, and national service. And we fund a 

variety of different methodologies and research 

methods. And one that we do fund, and especially with 

the 2018 grantees, is participatory research. And 

this type of research is working alongside and with 

communities. 

 And you’ll hear about two projects today and we also 

have a video that we’re going to show right now. So 
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after the video we will start with our speakers. So 

thank you and let us know if there’s any trouble on 

the chat or any questions or comments as well. Thank 

you. 

[video plays – music] 

DR. RIVERA: The trust of gaining the trust of the 

community is the biggest part of this particular kind 

of research. 

HARGROVE: I guess the best way to build trust within the 

community is to be totally engaged with them, to have 

them really talk about what it is that is important 

to them and to address for their community. To also 

think about that it’s really not a top-down 

communication, it’s a bottom-up. So being able to 

listen and be there authentically. 

DR. OHMER: We actually spent the first six to eight 

months of the project ingraining ourselves in the 

community, going to community meetings, recruiting a 
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community advisory board, having them and other 

residents inform how we do everything. 

DR. RIVERA: Participatory action research requires that 

the community feels that the information, that the 

decisions, that the whole process are there, they are 

a researcher as I am a researcher. 

[music] 

VALENTIN: Doing this type of research, which is 

participatory action research in my community 

specially, is very, very different and a lot more 

personal, you know? Instead of us just being people 

on the outside that are like collecting surveys or 

things like that, you know, we’re actually in the 

community doing interviews and events in the North 

End and this is where I’ve spent my entire life. 

ABRAHAM: To see a lot of times how community 

organizations don’t have the numbers, or the like 

hard facts, or the research sort of backing to be 

like, listen, our community has need and this issue 
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that we’re trying to address, but without that 

support of like research, especially like legislators 

or policymakers who look the other way, because at 

the end of the day like numbers talk. 

DR. CHIKKATUR: And so when we work with community 

researchers I would say that I’m, you know, I know 

some things about research, right, and I can teach 

about methodology, but you know your community in a 

way that I don’t. 

[music] 

DR. INTRATOR: And so, you know, in some sense the 

participatory action frame gives them a way to 

organize and it gives them a system and a practice to 

begin to sort of move through a process by which they 

identify a problem, collect data, speak to a broad 

range of constituents inside of a community, and then 

take that and synthesize it, and from that begin to 

develop real action-oriented solutions. 
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DR. ZIMMERMAN: It’s really about engaging stakeholders 

and it’s about engaging stakeholders to explore the 

issues that are impacting their community in order to 

be able to come up with solutions that, not only 

reflect the reality of what’s going on in their 

community and what they think is needed, but to 

generate community action and buy in for those 

solutions as they move forward with the process. 

[music] 

DR. WILLETT: It’s really fun, it’s rewarding, it’s 

impactful, it’s different than other types of 

research. So when we do other research projects that 

aren’t community-based or have an action component, 

sometimes it feels like we publish and we’re moving 

on with our careers, but what is really happening 

with this stuff? With this project I know that we’re 

trying to make a difference in people’s lives and we 

are making a difference in people’s lives. So I feel 

like that’s what we’re supposed to be doing with our 

research, research to action, and the community-based 
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participatory model just naturally lends itself to 

that. 

[video ends] 

DR. NARINE: Thanks, Andrea. And I loved watching that 

video because it highlights all of the great work 

that our research grantees are doing to engage 

communities and produce actionable solutions 

connected to national service and civic engagement. 

If you all want to watch that video again and learn 

more about participatory action research, you can 

check out the link in the chat. 

 So now we’re going to hear from our first speaker, 

Dr. Bryan Wright. Dr. Wright is the Executive 

Director of Cincinnati Compass, a collaborative that 

brings together local, state, and federal governments 

and community partners to promote and celebrate the 

cultural and economic contributions of new 

Cincinnatians, as well as connect individuals and 

organizations to resources and to each other to build 

capacities and opportunities. 
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 Dr. Wright is a dedicated connector and collaborator 

committed to inclusion, equity, and community 

building. His work focuses on creating a more 

welcoming and inclusive region for immigrants and 

refugees. Working alongside another of today’s 

speakers, Dr. Anjali Dutt, Dr. Wright used grant 

funds provided by AmeriCorps to help advance their 

work by putting immigrant and refugee voices, 

actions, and assets at the center of the frame in all 

they do. 

 Dr. Wright is travelling right now, hopefully for 

him, to somewhere tropical, but he sent us a 

recording describing his work. 

DR. WRIGHT: Good morning everybody. I hope you all are 

doing well. My name is Bryan Wright, I’m the 

Executive Director of Cincinnati Compass and I’m very 

happy to be here with you all this morning, at least 

in a recorded sense. My future self or present self 

is probably walking around an airport right now 

trying to find the terminal and hopefully getting on 
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the phone to join this call, and what promises to be 

a exciting and lively conversation and series of 

presentations. So I’m thankful to AmeriCorps, the 

Office of Research and Evaluation, and to Melissa, 

Andrea, Jenelle, Larissa, and the many others 

recording this event and for helping me be able to 

participate by recording. 

 And so what I’ll talk a little bit today is really 

setting the stage and talking about refugees to the 

United States and I want to focus on three things. I 

want to focus on, what do we mean by refugees? And, 

you know, just like the overall immigration system in 

the U.S., there’s not one clear pathway, despite what 

many people say, you know, to get in line. There are 

numerous lines that could take many, many years and 

there’s many pathways. And within the immigration 

system we have employment-based, family-based, and 

humanitarian-based kind of immigration practices and 

policies and pathways. 

 And I’ll be talking about that third one, the 

humanitarian. And when we talk about refugees, we 
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mean it has many different meanings and we’ll talk 

about different ways of getting here. The second 

thing we’ll talk about is the current situation and 

economic data. And then third, you know, get into 

what our project really gets into is leveraging 

assets and broadening the bench of representation of 

refugee communities. And I think that’s one of the 

key values that programs like this bring is helping 

to broaden the bench of representation of immigrants 

and refugees. 

 And so starting off, what do we mean by a refugee? 

And there are several different aspects under 

immigration law and policies where there’s many ways 

where people who are facing persecution, violence, 

war, other types of threats and oppression arrive at 

our borders, or even before arriving at our borders, 

apply for some kind of humanitarian protection and 

wanting to admit as a refugee. Someone who is located 

outside of the United States, is of special 

humanitarian concern to the U.S., and then 

demonstrates that they were persecuted or have fear 

of persecution due to race, religion, nationality, 
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political opinion, or membership in a particular 

social group, and they are not firmly resettled in 

another country and admissible to the United States. 

And is admissible to the United States, I’m sorry. 

 Another pathway we talk about is asylum. And that’s 

someone who arrives in the United States and is 

present in the United States, and either presents 

themselves lawfully, or at a port of entry, or 

crosses the border unlawfully and then applies for 

asylum. Either way we know that asylum is protected 

by international law and is an ethical and moral 

thing to do. And as we know, and I’ll talk about a 

little bit later, how it’s not ethically accessible 

to individuals who present themselves at the border 

or anywhere in the U.S. to apply for asylum. 

 But, again, asylum is someone who is here in the 

United States seeking protection because they have 

suffered persecution or fear that they will suffer 

persecution due to race, religion, nationality, 

membership in a particular social group, and 

political opinion. So we have refugees, we have 
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asylum seekers, we have asylees. And some more are 

humanitarian parolees and that’s a designation that 

we’re seeing more with, particularly with folks 

arriving from Afghanistan and more recently from 

Ukraine. 

 And so there is a new program coming up or that’s 

actually in place now Uniting for Ukraine. And under 

that program, people will be eligible for 

humanitarian parole. And then the difference with 

humanitarian parole is that while it provides work 

authorization and some kind of protection, it is not 

a pathway to citizenship as say an asylum or refugee 

status provides. 

 But, it does provide protection and then it really, 

whether it can or cannot lead to a pathway, a more 

permanent pathway really depends on kind of 

administration X, and that’s being examined for both 

the recent groups coming from Afghanistan and 

Ukraine. And some other statuses are TPS, temporary 

protected status that we’ve seen with individuals 

from Syria as well as more recently from Cameroon. 
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And then other groups like special immigrant visas 

and even special immigrant juvenile visas that we’re 

seeing again with community members from Afghanistan 

and other places as well. 

 So there’s a lot and I think what I can do is I can 

provide some resources, some links to some really 

good guides from American Immigration Council that 

helps to explain a lot of this. And so for our 

project, and my colleague is here today and she’ll go 

into more detail about it, Dr. Anjali Dutt, but for 

our project, Civic Action for Refugee Empowerment, 

CARE Cincinnati, we didn’t limit it to these kind of 

legal terms because we understand that the 

immigration system is complex, and difficult to 

navigate, and doesn’t always see people’s 

experiences. 

 And so for participation with our group, regardless 

of their immigration status, if someone fled a 

country and came to the U.S. to flee that persecution 

in search of a better, safer, we shall say, a safer 

way of life then we opened that opportunity for them 
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to participate in the program. So from that 

standpoint, the status didn’t matter, but it matters 

in a way where when we’re looking at access to 

benefits, particularly around social services and 

then also looking at the different ways of civic 

participation as well, where if someone wants to 

serve on a board or a committee immigration status 

plays a part in this, and so it matters then, and 

then also around voting where you have to be a U.S. 

citizen to be able to vote. 

 There’s many, many ways, as we know, to be engaged 

civically in our neighborhoods and across the U.S., 

but we’re not limiting it to immigration status. So 

what we’ve seen with some of the recent numbers here, 

we’ve seen a very stark decline. While there are 

numbers increasing across the southern border, and 

applications for asylum, and people being turned 

away, and then with programs like Title 42 that is 

actually being debated now, which is not an 

immigration policy but is a tool used to really kind 

of curb immigration, and so that’s being hotly 

debated now. 
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 And then other programs like Remain in Mexico, which 

are really problematic policies that limit one’s 

ability to apply for, to present themselves and apply 

for asylum. But, within the refugee resettlement 

process we’ve seen those numbers dwindle 

significantly to where, looking at 2018, the number, 

the cap was at 45,000, and only 22,500 individuals 

were resettled in that year here in the U.S. In 2019 

the cap went down to 30,000, 2020 down to 18,000, 

2021 it did go back up to 62,000, and this is where 

we see a change in administration where the previous 

administration was really trying to close down the 

refugee resettlement process, decimated the system 

across the globe and here in the United States. 

 And actually where the cap was, say for example, in 

2020 at 18,000, only 11,800 people were actually 

resettled in that year, and then it actually went 

down lower in 2021 to 11,411 because of the impacts 

of the previous years of really dismantling the 

system. So the current administration actually 

increased the numbers to the cap in 2022 to 125,000, 
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but we’ve only seen about 10,700 people be resettled 

in the United States to that point. So it is a system 

that is being redeveloped, I should say, and then 

more resources are being added to it. 

 But, we know there’s a huge backlog with USCIS with 

some of these other immigration statuses, asylum 

applications, temporary protected status, 

humanitarian parole, special immigrant visa, and 

others. And so there’s many different ways and so 

probably with the work that you’re doing, you may 

work with refugees that are traditional refugees that 

have applied for protections outside the U.S., and we 

know that globally there are many, many displaced 

persons and there are roughly 25.9 million refugees 

worldwide that have actually the status and they’re 

looking to be resettled. And I can share some more 

data. 

 And locally we’re seeing refugee communities coming 

from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar, 

Burma, Syria, and Bhutan. And actually Bhutanese 

refugees make up the largest refugee population in 
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the state of Ohio. And so one of the powers of and 

the benefits of this project, that Anjali and I have 

been working with community members over the last 

several years, is that it really centers the lived 

experience and voices of refugees communities, not in 

a way for people to share their trauma, but to really 

share their experiences and advocate for better 

policies, and that’s one of the strengths. 

 And so we start from a point of the assets, and the 

knowledge, and the skill sets that refugees bring to 

help change, not only immigration, but also broader 

civic challenges that we have. And we know that, you 

know, when refugees come they not only bring assets, 

but bring economic power. So, for example, and this 

is kind of dated, but in 2015 refugee households 

earned $77.2 billion dollars and contributed more 

than $6.4 billion dollars to state and local taxes 

with $14.5 billion going to federal taxes. And this 

leaves them with $56.3 billion in spending power. 

 So economically, refugees are a strong power in 

driving the economy in the U.S. And also we know that 
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refugees are entrepreneurial, start businesses, and 

then hire individuals. And we know that the 

investments that are put in, in the initial refugee 

resettlement, that there is a long-term gain where 

refugee communities are putting back into the economy 

and are key economic contributors to the U.S. and to 

our local economies, as well as in areas of civic 

engagement. 

 And that’s one of the things we’re trying to do is to 

help broaden the bench of representation, not only in 

boards and councils in the private sector, but also 

in the nonprofit sector and also in government. We 

want to see more refugee representation on our city 

councils, on our county commissions, on our parks 

board, and so on different elected boards and 

commissions and neighborhood communities so that we 

can help shift policies and workforce and economic 

development spaces, that we can have more inclusive 

startup policies and practices as well. 

 And so, again, that’s really I think one of the key 

powers of this program and the work that we’ve been 
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doing is to, not only gather data that is gathered 

and centered, but centering the experiences and the 

voices of refugee communities so that the work of 

Compass becomes just a platform to elevate those 

voices and center the experiences of refugee 

communities to really help shape inclusive practices 

and policies. 

 And I think these kind of things will come up later 

on during the day, which I’m hoping I’m able to join 

you, and I just want to kind of set the stage of kind 

of where we are, and hopefully I’ll be able to join 

and answer some questions later. So thank you for 

your time and I hope you all have a good morning. 

Thank you. 

DR. MCDONALD: Thank you so much, Bryan, for sharing 

your deep knowledge with us and for helping us to 

ground our conversation today. So next we’re so 

thrilled to be joined live by Dr. Anjali Dutt. Anjali 

is an Assistant Professor of Social and Community 

Psychology at the University of Cincinnati. Her 

research focuses on psychological processes that are 
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associated with resistance to oppression and 

increasing the wellbeing of marginalized communities, 

particularly in the context of globalization. 

 So she’s here to share with us how, with AmeriCorps 

support, she’s been able to work collaboratively with 

refugee communities to connect research findings with 

actions to support refugee civic engagement. Anjali, 

this is – 

DR. DUTT: Thanks so much for having me here today. I 

really appreciate having this opportunity. And I just 

heard from Bryan, as you can see and can tell from 

the previous talk that he and I have been working 

together on this. Bryan just texted me and said that 

he’s still in security, so he hasn’t been able to 

join yet, but hopefully he’ll able to join 

eventually, but it was great to have him starting us 

on off in the way that he was able to. 

 And on this first slide you see that there’s a photo 

of me and Bryan, and those photos are there today 

because we were two who are speaking today, but I 
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really want to emphasize that everything I’m going to 

be talking about was a team effort. The beauty of 

participatory research is that you’re bringing 

together the perspectives, insights, ideas, goals, 

etc. of people from so many different contexts. And 

so, like I said, those pictures are of us because 

we’re the ones talking today, but there will be other 

pictures that showcase everyone who came together to 

create this project. So I can’t underscore enough 

that this has been something that’s been profoundly 

collaborative and for me that’s been one of the 

biggest gifts of this project and experiences. 

 And also, I really can’t thank AmeriCorps enough for 

giving us this opportunity to do this work. I think 

it’s hard to find funding that truly lets you do 

something really profoundly participatory where we 

collectively even creating our research questions 

together as a team. And so I feel so grateful to have 

had this opportunity so far. Could you go to the next 

slide, please? 
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 So what I’m going to do today is talk about the study 

that we’ve been doing since 2018. Myself and Bryan, 

as well as another colleague, Dr. Farrah Jacquez, who 

is also a community psychology at the University of 

Cincinnati, found out about this funding opportunity. 

We’ve been working on different things related to 

refugees, immigrants, and civic participation in 

different capacities, but after we found out about 

this funding opportunity, it really solidified our 

desire to work together. 

 So after being rewarded the funding, we were able to 

come together as a team, at the beginning with just 

the three of us, and reach out to several different 

refugee communities in the Cincinnati area and think 

about what we might be able to accomplish together. 

So we had contacted, at the time that we were 

applying, several different refugee support 

organizations that exist in Cincinnati, specifically 

Catholic charities, which is the main refugee 

resettlement organization in the region, and then two 

smaller organizations that do support for refugees in 

the area. 
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 But, really importantly, all three of these 

organizations are run by people who are not refugees 

or immigrants themselves. And so what we were really 

interested in, when we were doing this work, is doing 

something that really centers as much refugee and 

immigrant, at this phase, refugee voices as possible. 

So we reached out to those organizations to ask if 

they knew of anyone who might be interested in 

partnering with us who were members of refugee 

communities and we had several people who were 

recommended to us, I personally cold called them and 

asked if they might be interested in connecting. 

 And back in 2018, a group of about, I think initially 

we had about 15 people who came in the beginning and 

we ended up solidifying into a team of 12 people from 

the refugee community, myself, Farrah, and Bryan. We 

all kind of came together and started to share, we 

were really interested in increasing civic engagement 

opportunities for refugees in the area, but when it 

comes to what exactly are the questions we want to 

ask, we have a few ideas, but we’re really interested 
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in collaboratively coming up with what these 

questions might be. 

 And so what we did, initially, is we met, we had a 

meal together. I’ve been doing participatory research 

for about a decade at this point and I’ve learned 

that bringing together people over a meal can really 

help facilitate kind of the casual conversations that 

eventually become the more meaningful, more 

exploratory conversations. So we initially did that, 

talked a little bit about what we might do, and then 

setup a schedule of repeatedly meeting for several 

months, basically. 

 

 Within a couple months, a couple meetings, really I 

think by our third meeting we had a solid plan. 

Through our initial conversations it had become 

really clear that although there is some support for 

refugees and their transition to life in Cincinnati, 

that support goes to very specific people. And 

Cincinnati is a city that has a lot of secondary 

migrants and what that means is that people are 

resettled in the United States as official refugees 
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in a different city and then move to Cincinnati for a 

number of reasons, largely the availability of jobs 

and the low cost of living, and there are some 

established refugee communities here that make people 

want to come to this area. 

 When you’re a refugee and you come to the United 

States things will vary dependent upon your 

circumstances, but the average is that you get 90 

days of support from an official support organization 

and they will assist you with things like enrolling 

your children in school, finding you an apartment, 

helping you find employment. Somebody might pair up 

with you for a day and teach you how to go to the 

grocery store or just things about navigating life in 

the United States. 

 But, as I said, that support usually exists only for 

90 days. I’ve lived in Cincinnati for five years, I’m 

from the United States, I speak English, and I still 

think I have difficulty sometimes navigating life in 

the city because I’m not from the city. So I know 

that 90 days often isn’t enough. And that was 
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something that was coming up repeatedly in our 

conversations that people wanted not just that 

initial support, but a deeper understanding of how to 

navigate life and really, truly, and deeply engage in 

the community. 

 So over time, and the vast majority of refugees, as 

you can see on the slide, that we have over 25,000 

refugees in the greater Cincinnati community, the 

vast majority are people who move here as secondary 

migrants. So they don’t even get any of that support. 

And if you move to another city, after being 

officially resettled, you don’t have any of that 

guaranteed support as you might if you’re an official 

refugee being initially resettled. 

 So kind of through learning about what life was like 

in the initial phase of transitioning to life in 

Cincinnati, it became really clear that it was really 

challenging and we came up with this idea of 

anchoring our initial research questions and 

determining how we can identify what the initial 

barriers are to participation and wellbeing that 
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refugees experience as they’re initially moving into 

this area. 

 And then, as Bryan shared and as the previous video 

has been sharing and I think why everybody is here, 

as you all know, that a core component to this work 

is not just the research but really pairing it with 

actions. So from that point on we knew that by 

gaining insight into some of these initial questions 

we’d get some insight into actions we could actually 

do to promote change. Can we go to the next slide? 

 Thank you. So we ended up doing a multi-phase 

research project and action project. Because I only 

have 15 minutes, we do have several publications at 

this point, and I’m always happy to elaborate on 

anything I’m going to talk about, but I decided that 

it might be more optimal to talk about all the phases 

we went through and kind of share an overview of 

different aspects of the projects, but please ask any 

questions and I’d be happy to expand upon anything 

that’s written here. 
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 But, so what we initially did is we decided to do a 

survey to learn about how many refugee communities 

are experiencing life in this city. And I forgot to 

mention, so here you can actually see our whole team. 

And just to tell you a little bit about the people 

who ended up forming the CARE Cincinnati team, and 

CARE stands for Civic Action for Refugee Empowerment, 

we have refugees from seven different countries who 

spoke six different first languages. Our members 

included people from Burundi, Iraq, the Congo, 

Somalia, Guatemala, Syria, Bhutan, and the first 

languages included Kirundi, Arabic, French, Somali, 

Spanish, and English. 

 It was roughly half female, half male, and our age 

range was also to me quite impressively diverse. We 

had people ranging from 16 years of age, as core 

research members who are really interested and 

committed to being involved in this project, all the 

way up to 75 years old at the start of this project, 

so he’s now almost 80. Having this age diversity was 

such an added source of connection and wisdom and 
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really challenged our capacity to think about how do 

we ensure that everybody’s voice is equally heard. 

 And I will also note that people ranged from the time 

spent – So the most recent person who had moved to 

the United States on our team had been here for three 

years, the longest was twelve years. So relatively 

recent but nobody was brand new, so everybody had had 

some time to really think deeply about this process 

of transitioning and what that meant, and those 

experiences really contributed I think to the reasons 

we went with our initial research design. 

 So through a series of conversations, given the 

question that we had, we decided that the best thing 

to do would be to try to find out from as many 

refugees as possible about what their life had been 

like during this period of transition, what 

challenges they faced, what things had worked really 

well for them, and what kind of changes they wanted 

to see in the future, how might they want to engage, 

etc. So we were able to do a survey where we could 

reach 291 local refugees. 
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 We collaboratively designed the survey. I’m a 

psychologist and often in psychology we really 

prioritize using established psychometrically sound 

surveys, but we decided what was more important was 

capturing the perspectives that were most important 

to refugees. So we actually worked collaboratively to 

create a survey that could be interpreted and keep 

the same meaning question by question across all six 

languages that the survey was going to be 

administered in. 

 And just to share some of the findings. And questions 

included things like, do you have trouble with 

transportation in the city? Do you feel safe where 

you live? Is there a person you can count on at any 

time in Cincinnati? Are you able to use your 

education and skills here in Cincinnati? Have you 

been able to get the healthcare you need? Do you ever 

feel like you don’t know the rules of life in the 

United States or in Cincinnati in particular? Are 

your children happy with the life they have here in 

Cincinnati? 
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 So we kind of worked together to create what we felt 

was a pretty comprehensive survey that included 22 

questions and gave us insight into several different 

domains that we kind of worked together on over a 

series of several months to come up with the optimal 

survey. 

 The majority of the people who completed the survey 

were Burundians – Sorry, not Burundian, 42% from the 

Bhutanese community, 8% from the Burundian community, 

10% from the Guatemalan, 10% from the Congolese, 13% 

Somali, and 17% from the Arabic speaking communities, 

which is how that group tends to connect. And so I 

just share that because we were able to somewhat 

closely approximate the communities that are in 

Cincinnati. So we have a majority Bhutanese community 

in Cincinnati, but it continues to be a fairly 

diverse refugee community in the area. 

 We compensated people with a $10 gift card to a local 

grocery store chain for completing the survey. And 

our co-researchers were compensated for all of the 
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surveys that they administered as well. And we were 

really excited by what we found, to be honest. We 

found that there was a lot of positivity about 

people’s experiences in Cincinnati. Most people 

shared that - More than 50% strongly agreed with 

statements like they like their living situation, 

that they felt safe where they lived, that they were 

happy with the amount of time they had to spend with 

family, they had friendships here and people that 

they can count on, and that they felt welcome in the 

city and wanted to be more involved in the city life. 

 So we were thrilled to hear that, but also a little 

bit surprised. It was a little bit more positive than 

what we were expecting based on the discussions we 

had been having. There were also areas of concern. 

The largest areas of concern had to do with 

employment. A lot of people who were from the refugee 

communities are highly skilled, have advanced 

degrees, have professional careers, and then when 

moving to the United States don’t have the 

opportunity to use the education and skills that 

they’ve gained and experience that they gained. 
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 In our area the largest employer of refugees is 

Amazon. And so a lot of people go from being 

teachers, dentists, doctors, architects, many other 

things to being pickers at Amazon, which is not 

always the most fulfilling experience for people. 

 The other area where we found consistent lower levels 

of satisfaction with life in Cincinnati was, do you 

ever feel like you don’t know the rules in the United 

States and do you feel like you don’t know how to get 

through the system here? So there was a lot of people 

saying that they were grateful for many of the 

experiences they had had here, but knowing how to 

really navigate life was an area that they wanted 

more support and that ended up informing a lot of the 

actions we did next. 

 So then phase two we, because we were kind of 

surprised by the level of positivity and because we 

wanted to use participatory methods to learn more 

about how people were experiencing life rather than 

just the survey, we decided to do focus groups. So 
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where the survey we were predominantly looking about 

the experiences of refugee groups as a whole, in our 

focus groups we had people-led focus groups with 

their own communities. And what we did is we took the 

findings from the surveys and made some charts that 

were really easily digestible, just kind of 

frequencies of what people said, and then asked folks 

to give us more understanding of why people responded 

the way they did, so to give us deeper insight into 

what those survey findings meant to the people who 

were in attendance of the focus groups. 

 And from that we were able to get some really 

interesting insight. So although a lot of people said 

they were really happy, that they felt safe where 

they lived, and that they were happy with their life 

here, often times when in the focus groups they 

shared that that was in comparison sometimes to 

living in a refugee camp. So, for example, with the 

Bhutanese refugees, many of them had been living in a 

refugee camp in Nepal for 20 years prior to coming 

here. So the comparison that they were making didn’t 

necessarily mean that they were living the life that 
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they truly wanted to be living in Cincinnati, but 

rather that compared to what they had been 

experiencing before, this was something that was more 

positive. 

 In these focus groups we also heard repeatedly this 

desire for skills to be more recognized. Specifically 

they talked about specific poor treatment that they 

had experienced in specific domains. And repeatedly 

this frustration with not knowing how to navigate the 

rules and norms of our communities became really 

apparent. So after talking about the specific 

frequencies and kind of asking people to elaborate on 

why they felt people responded this way and what did 

these questions really mean to them, we also asked 

people about actions they wanted and what could we do 

as a team to really work to improve the experiences 

of refugees, and that became our third phase. Could 

you go to the next slide? 

 Thanks. And so then the last thing I wanted to talk 

about is what we were able to do. And again, it was 

incredible to have funding from AmeriCorps to be able 
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to actually, not just find out insight into what’s 

going on, but use that insight to create programs and 

create things that would actually address some of the 

concerns. One of the things that had come up 

repeatedly, as you know at this point, was that 

people had difficulty understanding like, how do we 

go beyond that 90 days of support and really 

understand how to live in this region? 

 Some of the people on the team had said that they 

previously lived in Chicago and there was this “How 

to Live in Chicago” manual that they were given. And 

we talked a lot about, how could we do something like 

that? It was a community organization that had 

created this “How to Live in Chicago” guide and we 

felt like it could be something that we could do that 

was similar. 

 And we ended up talking a lot about, should we create 

a manual like that that’s written or should we do 

something more, something else? And so what we came 

up is videos because that we could do in multiple 

languages and we could make shorter videos, we could 
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make longer videos, we could respond, it’s something 

that could be ongoing, and I think it’s something 

that will live on for a long time. So far we have 

made a few, one, for example, about landlord-tenant 

rights, another one about getting support around 

mental health. We’re working on one around education. 

 And one thing, much to my surprise because I don’t 

particularly like social media typically, we have 

actually talking and prioritizing making TikTok 

videos because they’re quick, and people really like 

them, and they can answer questions quite easily. So 

that’s one of the things that we’re – We have some 

that are totally complete and some that we’re still 

working on and I think it’s actually something that 

will hopefully live on for a long time because TikTok 

videos, for the youth on our team, are really easy to 

make, amazingly so. 

 Another thing that was really powerful for us was the 

creation of a refugee and immigrant civic leadership 

program. So we’ve so far had three cohorts go through 

this, but we created a multi-week program in which 
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refugees and immigrants were meeting with us, 

unfortunately over Zoom, because this was postpandemic, but to talk about – We had guest speakers 

from the city, people from city council, people who 

were involved in county government, people involved 

in different local organizations, and other refugees 

who had been involved in community engagement, and we 

created a program that people were given a stipend, 

if they completed, that gave people the opportunity 

to learn more about like, how do you engage in civic 

leadership? 

 Including things like, how do you report that you 

need a stoplight on your street? How do you report 

that something not great is happening in your 

neighborhood or that you want another bus stop? Like, 

what is the process for doing that? And then all the 

way up to things like, how do you get involved in 

city council? So we had cohorts that met every other 

week for ten weeks. The program was about ten hours 

total. And we did a pre- and post-assessment of folks 

who were involved in that program and my graduate 

student, Christine, she is currently working on 
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analyzing the findings to see the impact that it’s 

had, and although she’s not done with the official 

analyses, we can already tell that people feel like 

they’ve gained a sense of efficacy in navigating life 

through that. 

 The last thing that we did, we initially had planned 

– One of the things that had come out of the focus 

groups is people wanted to have an opportunity to 

connect with each other more in the refugee community 

across communities. Because as it stands, there’s 

opportunities for people in like the Bhutanese 

community to connect with each other, there’s an 

organization for the Bhutanese community, there’s an 

organization for the Congolese community. In the 

Mosque a lot of folks from Iraq and Syria connect 

with each other. 

 But, there isn’t as much opportunity to connect 

across groups and that was something that folks 

shared that they really liked about CARE Cincinnati. 

So we had this plan to have a party for about 300 

people and we were going to have like a fair 
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included. We started planning quite a bit and this 

was scheduled for, I think it was March 20th, 2020. 

I’m sure you’re all not surprised to hear that we had 

to cancel that. The most humorous thing to me is that 

we were like, oh, we’ll postpone it till the summer. 

We didn’t initially think about the fact that, you 

know, this would be an ongoing pandemic. 

 But, we were able to divert that funding and do 

another survey to find out about how immigrants and 

refugees are – Actually, I’m sorry, just specifically 

refugees at that time. How refugees were experiencing 

COVID, which was really insightful and really to us 

highlighted the precarity because a lot of that 

positivity that we heard about experiences prior to 

COVID decreased quite substantially. And because the 

team was already really skilled at doing the survey 

from the previous study, we were able to do that 

quite quickly, reach out to almost 200 people. 

 And then, via Bryan, we were able to share our 

findings with city government. And we were able to 

actually have a voice to say like, this is what’s 
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going on for the refugee community, which is a group 

that is not particularly well-represented in city 

government in Cincinnati at this moment in time. So 

we were able to actually get them to earmark, for 

example, funding to prevent evictions or loss of 

housing specifically to refugee communities at that 

time. So although we were very disappointed not to be 

able to have that party, I think we were able to do 

something really meaningful with it. 

 And although, you know, this era of the project is 

slowly coming to an end, I think there’s a lot that I 

think will continue on for many years and I can’t 

express enough gratitude for what we’ve been able to 

do because of AmeriCorps. So thank you all so much. 

That’s all I had. 

DR. NARINE: Thank you, Anjali. The work you’re doing with 

Cincinnati Compass is so important to creating a 

diverse civic engagement infrastructure and also 

fostering a sense of belonging among new 

Cincinnatians. So, again, thank you. So our next two 

speakers are Doctors Jenna Cushing-Leubner and Pang 
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Yang. Dr. Cushing-Leubner is an Assistant Professor 

in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of 

Wisconsin Whitewater, where she teaches in the 

Bilingual and Multicultural slash ESL minor program 

and coordinates the Heritage Language Education 

professional development program, and the World 

Languages licensure program. 

 She has spent over a decade working with teachers, 

youth, and community educators to create high school 

Spanish and Hmong heritage language and ethnic 

studies programs that emphasize community knowledge, 

identity work, multimodal literacies, social justice, 

youth research, and transformative teaching. She is 

currently co-director with Pang Yang of the Lub Zej 

Zog Hmong Educators Coalition and Minnesota Zej Zog, 

a community-driven organization committed to 

reclaiming and sustaining Hmong language, leadership, 

and cultural knowledge through intergenerational 

language, culture, and arts education. 

 Dr. Yang is a dedicated multilingual veteran teacher, 

the mother of seven children, and the lead 
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practitioner researcher of the Zej Zog project for 

Hmong Language and Ethnic Studies Education. Her 20 

plus years of K through 12 classroom experience 

include the teaching of English language learners and 

Hmong heritage language learners. And taking on the 

roles of a counselor, cultural navigator, parent 

educator, grant writer, event coordinator, and an 

advocate for students of color. She’s the Co-Convener 

of the National Coalition of Hmong Teachers, the CoExecutive Director of Minnesota Zej Zog, a visionary 

of Project Shaw New, the 2019 Minnesota Languages and 

Cultures Teacher of the Year, and serves on several 

school and community committees. Dr. Cushing-Leubner 

and Yang, the floor is yours. 

DR. CUSHING-LEUBNER: Thank you so much. We’re so happy to 

be here. My name is Cushing-Leubner, just a little 

pronunciation difference. So can we go to the next 

slide? 

 We’re going to present about our multiyear project, 

this is a participatory design research project which 

is kind of a cousin to participatory action research, 
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which people are a little more familiar with, but 

participatory design research brings community 

researchers together to design teaching and learning 

materials and environments in order to change and do 

transformational, in this case, educational change 

through the participatory research process. So I’m 

actually going to turn this over to Pang to talk 

about our starting point and the heart and goals of 

Lub Zej Zog Project. 

DR. YANG: Thank you, Dr. Jenna. I am just so privileged 

to be a part of this project with Dr. Jenna. It’s 

just been – I had no idea what I was getting myself 

into, but the results are priceless. And so I wanted 

to begin a little bit about who the Hmong people are, 

as outside the Twin Cities they may not be very well 

known. But, the Hmong people are refugees from Laos. 

In the mid-1970s we were involved with the CIA in the 

Secret War in Laos. 

 And so because of our involvement and the turnover of 

the country over to communism, we had to flee for our 

lives. And so that’s what hundreds of thousands of 
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Hmong people had to do during that time period, to 

flee to Thailand, and eventually those who were sided 

alongside the CIA were likely able to go around the 

world to immigrate to different countries. And so my 

family, along with lots of other Hmong families, came 

to America. And the majority of the Hmong people 

today live in California, dispersed throughout 

various cities in California, but the Twin Cities in 

Minnesota has the highest urban concentration of 

Hmong people in the United States and so forth. 

 So like I shared, I came to the United States as a 

1.5 generation Hmong person and I came when I was 

about three years old. And in the 80s and 90s, even 

myself along with my siblings and many other Hmong 

students, we eventually ended up losing our language. 

I was very, very fortunate that I still was able to 

hang on to some of the language, but most students 

growing up during that time lost the language because 

of the English only policies like, speak in English 

in school and don’t speak your language and so forth. 
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 So eventually that loss of language led to the loss 

of our identity. I think growing up in the United 

States I’ve struggled with my own identity into adult 

life in figuring out who I am, what is my story, that 

missing story that I have not been able to find. It 

took me years and years and decades to be able to 

find it. And then the intergenerational trauma that 

came along with it. 

 Because of the war, a lot of our parents had PTSD, 

which was not dealt with and so that also, in turn, 

ended up passing it on to like myself and my own 

children, that intergeneration trauma is so real. And 

so moving forward, in the 2000s, you know, a lot of 

parents were like, oh my gosh, now I’m parent age and 

I don’t even have the language anymore. I’m so lost 

in life, but I need to have my children to know who 

they are. And so that’s when a lot of the dual 

language charter schools in Minnesota started popping 

up and across the country to reclaim that language 

piece because we were seeing large gaps, academic 

gaps. 
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 There was just large differences between within the 

Asian ethnic groups and so we were very worried about 

the future of Hmong youths and the future of the 

community. And so a decade after the startup of 

various heritage language programs in the Twin 

Cities, Jenna and I finally got connected through, 

when I started the Hmong language program at my high 

school at Park Center High School in the school 

district in Brooklyn Park. 

 And so when we finally got together, we were, you 

know, I was telling Dr. Jenna, I’m like, oh my gosh, 

there’s so many obstacles and everyone is kind of 

working in silo, there’s not really much out there in 

terms of curriculum, and there’s not even licensed 

Hmong teachers, and oh my gosh, I’m not even as 

fluent as what I want to be as a Hmong teacher. And 

all the trauma that I’ve gone through and the healing 

that needs to take place, I was still on that 

journey. 

 And so when this opportunity came about, we took all 

the obstacles that existed within the educator, the 
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youth community, the Hmong community itself and we 

turned them into opportunities to help us grow and 

thrive moving forward. I’ll turn it over back to Dr. 

Jenna. 

DR. CUSHING-LEUBNER: Thank you, Pang. Can we move to the 

next slide, please? So I’ll share a little bit about 

our research design. So as I said, this is a 

participatory design research project. We think of it 

as a garden for community-driven educational change. 

And we think of that garden really intentionally when 

we think about, not only, you know, elements of like 

nutrients in the soil and the mycelium network of the 

soil that support the growth of different plants that 

become both nourishment of food products, but also 

medicine that grows from these gardens. 

 But, also the sun, the water, but also that in order 

to keep that soil strong and well-nourished, to grow 

those medicines and foods that we also need to change 

over, you know, what is happening in that soil that 

keeps the soil vibrant and able to nourish these 

growing plants. So our participatory design research 
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project is really driven from that. We have multiple 

interconnected projects. So the participatory aspect 

of our design research also says that this is 

community-driven participatory design research. And 

community-driven here means that the directions that 

our projects take in these cycles or these 

participatory cycles may go in directions that we did 

not anticipate, but they are grown out of the cycle 

that we’re in. 

 And so this has gone in several directions we did not 

anticipate originally and that helps to keep our 

project strong and our participatory researchers 

growing through their participation in the project, 

which is really, really their own. So what you can 

see here are some of our participatory researchers. 

Our participant design is a combination of – we start 

with Hmong educators who are also parents, elders, 

grandparents, aunts, uncles, and children within the 

Hmong community. 

 So there are multiple layers of identities within the 

Hmong community of our participatory researchers. And 
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we have for each participatory project that 

interconnects together, we have lead community 

researchers who are mentored up through the research 

experience and earlier phases, and then take on roles 

of lead researchers depending on their expertise and 

knowledge keeping that they bring to the project. And 

then we also have community design research teams 

that are often times smaller teams. 

 So our entire team is quite large. At this point we 

have 120 participant teachers and community 

educators. We have about 40 active participant 

research members. And then at any given time we may 

have teams of 5 to 9 participants researchers and 

those are led by 1 to 3 lead community researchers. 

 Our community aims bring our design research and our 

action and findings all together. So this has looked 

like the development of curriculum, materials 

development that represents culturally sustaining 

approaches and language reclamation through Hmong 

cultural knowledge and ethnic studies education, 

professional development for teachers across a wide 
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range. This is culturally sustaining mental health 

and wellness intergenerational trauma healing and 

responsive teaching. Language reclamation across a 

heteroglossic, that means the dialects are quite 

unique, and so teaching Hmong language reclamation 

through multiple dialects in order to keep both 

dialects that are most common, or the three dialects 

that are most common in the United States strong. 

 But, also growing those language and dialect 

abilities within the teachers and growing the 

reclamation of cultural knowledge. This also leads to 

the program growth and stability of our availability 

of Hmong language reclamation education in the United 

States K-12 public schools. And we also then develop 

teacher leadership within that and the formation of 

Hmong educational scholars from within the community 

research group. 

 So I’m going to turn it back over to Pang to talk 

more about some of the shape of our findings. And 

Pang is going to talk about the community-driven 

findings and then I’m going to talk, if we have time, 
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about some of the scholarship that is growing out of 

this right now. 

DR. YANG: Alright, can you go the next slide? I’m not 

going to read everything that’s on here just because 

I know that you can also read it, but we went through 

several phases through the last three years and each 

one of those phases had different ways of working 

with our teachers, or elders, or youth, etc. I wanted 

to say that by the end of year two, a lot of – Well, 

actually, at the beginning of the project a lot of 

our teachers were very skeptical about what we were 

doing, not necessarily skeptical of Dr. Jenna, but 

more skeptical about my place. 

 Like, what was your hidden agenda? And really I told 

them, I don’t have a hidden agenda, I don’t even know 

what I’m doing. But, Dr. Jenna is leading this work 

and we are going to hop on and we’re going to do this 

together because I know that whatever is going to 

happen is going to be beautiful. And by the end of 

the year two, phase two a lot of our teachers are 
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like, Pang and Jenna, when the funding is gone, 

what’s going to happen to us? 

 We started this beautiful, this beautiful work 

together and now we’re all working collaboratively, 

and we’re all figuring out what kind of opportunities 

can come out of all the obstacles that we’ve gone 

through, so out of that came out of the – now we have 

a nonprofit, Minnesota Zej Zog, which continues the 

work and it continues to find other grants source 

funding to help support teachers and help support 

youths, help support the community so that they can 

grow and thrive. 

 And so this work has really transformed, not just the 

Minnesota Hmong community, but the Hmong community 

all over the country because people are invested and 

are interested in this work. I’m going to throw it 

back to Dr. Jenna. 

DR. CUSHING-LEUBNER: Yeah, thank you, Pang. So, again, 

the work that we’re doing is really rooted across 

three states because the Hmong community has been, 
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their refugee resettlement program followed a 

fractured resettlement design intentionally spreading 

the community across the United States. And so one of 

the first acts that the Hmong community then did was 

to resettle themselves into some of these clustered 

communities. And they look very different, but our 

main groups that we’re working with are located in 

California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, so really 

across many places. 

 But, we’re talking about many of our participant 

researchers who may be located in Minnesota or 

Wisconsin are talking to their cousins who are 

located in California. So really the family of the 

Hmong community is interconnected across the 

geographical distances and there’s a lot of deep 

knowledge and understanding within the community of 

how to maintain family and kinship connections across 

forced space. 

 And so one of the ways that also, in addition to all 

of the findings that are really actionable resources 

that are created within the community spaces, we also 
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are in our phase right now of developing some of our 

research and scholarship. Sorry, not developing our 

research, but developing our scholarship for academic 

dissemination. And that has looked like also 

cultivating a group of educational researchers and 

scholars. So over the last three years, going on four 

years now, that has included growing up, we have one 

of our lead community researchers, Dr. Vicky XiongLor, who has been doing incredible work with Hmong 

language reclamation for years, she is shifting now 

into academic spaces for teacher education to bring 

this directly into the teacher education spaces. 

 We also have teachers who are entering into MAD 

programs and now PhD programs as well. And we’ve 

tapped into and supported Hmong education PhD 

students to bring them into our work to support the 

growth of our understandings and for them to find a 

home, often times Hmong PhD students who are 

interested in this sort of thing are very isolated in 

their programs. 
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 So some of the exciting scholarship that is coming 

out of that. Over the last three years we have 

published with a community, a Hmong community 

publisher, her publisher. We have published over 

seven books that are a combination of community and 

youth authors that includes a guide book for Hmong 

ethnic studies and youth participatory action 

research that is bilingual in Hmong and English, 

coauthored by Hmong youth who have participated in 

YPAR projects because they’ve learned from educators 

from the participatory design research how to do 

YPAR. And they’re doing community and school action 

research projects for transformational change. 

 We also have been developing some very exciting 

scholarship connected to Hmong teachers who are 

engaging in what we’re calling Hmong mother work. So 

these are teachers who are not just coming into 

education because of their love for education and 

teaching, they’re coming into their work always 

connected through that they are mothers and parents, 

right, and in some cases, now grandparents who are 
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teaching their own children and families in culture 

reclamation environments. 

 And so we are developing some scholarship to identify 

the power and insights of these parent and 

grandparent teachers from within the Hmong community. 

We’re also engaging in what’s called sub-alternate 

linguistic studies. So this is community subalternate linguistic study exploring and bringing to 

light linguistic understandings, language 

understandings that are not represented in the 

literature to this point that understand the complex 

nature of the Hmong dialect and language, which also 

allows for these programs to grow and thrive, and 

creates a community-driven research agenda and 

scholarship production agenda to also grow the 

representation, the accurate and in community 

representation of Hmong language and knowledge in the 

literature, which right now is really very limited 

and historically has been developed by people outside 

of Hmong community. 
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 So that’s just some of the exciting. Oh, I’m sorry, 

and then one other piece here is that the way that we 

do some of this research is also through 

methodologies that come from indigenous language 

reclamation. And in these ways one of the 

methodologies we use is called story work. And this 

is where we do story sessions that also act to 

reclaim the language. So as community members and 

participant researchers share their stories of their 

experiences, whether it’s their journey stories of 

their work as educators and teachers, their journey 

stories of becoming researchers and participant 

researchers, they are doing that then through the 

Hmong language and dialects, and that creates then an 

environment for language reclamation through doing 

their own theorizing of their experiences and 

processes. 

 So all of this stuff is really interconnected and 

very exciting and just really scratches the surface 

of what we’re seeing as very possible when communitydriven participatory research is at the heart of 

reclaiming the collective power within refugee 
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communities. And that’s it. That’s where we’re going 

to stop. 

DR. MCDONALD: Thank you so much. A big thank you to all 

of our presenters today and giving us a little 

picture into your communities. We’re going to circle 

back to them in the Q&A section in just a minute. But 

first, as an Office of Research and Evaluation we of 

course not only value meaningful research, but also 

how the research and findings can be utilized 

including international service programs that we 

serve in our office. So we’re thrilled to be joined 

today by some of our agency and program leadership to 

share some of their reflections about the research 

they learned about today. 

 So Sonali Nijhawan, Director of AmeriCorps State and 

National is joining us. Jacob Sgambati, Deputy 

Director of AmeriCorps NCCC, and Jackie Dulude in 

Recruitment at AmeriCorps. We’ve asked them to give 

some reflections on the speakers and presentation. 

Sonali, we’re going to start with you. 
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NIJHAWAN: Great, thank you so much to the Office of 

Research and Evaluation and our incredible research 

partners for the opportunity to join you all today 

and just to hear about the incredible work that you 

all are doing to really elevate the voice to empower 

community and to give us an insight and a reminder of 

the importance of the work that we’re doing, but more 

so the importance of the voice of those that we are 

serving. And so I’ll just share very quickly, there 

are a handful of words that I heard that really 

resonated for me. 

 So the elevating of voice, of refugee voice. The 

empowerment of folks who have come to this country 

and to give them the opportunity to own the path 

forward. The valuing of the skills that they bring to 

our country economically, as Dr. Wright shared, or 

just the value and knowledge that they bring from 

where they come from. The highlighting of 

authenticity and the celebrating of the unique 

culture and identity that everyone carries and 

helping to bring that forth. 
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 The building of community through these research 

studies. The way that connections are made for folks 

and how they can find connection and unity with one 

another I think is really powerful and meaningful. 

The way that this research is not just responsive, 

but action-oriented to take the research and to think 

about how it can be utilized to take action and how 

it can inform policy, how it can empower someone to 

want to make sure that they are represented. 

 So I think the big pieces that really I think 

resonated significantly for me was the value of 

representation, right, and having refugee voice 

determine direction for a population. And to develop 

and create understanding. And I think this was 

something that was just mentioned by Pang, to be 

seen, and how being seen can help with healing. And 

so I think I just want to say that all of this 

research and all of these words that resonated for me 

are also things and ideals that resonated for me are 

things that we think about in our service. 
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 How do we elevate the voice of our members and our 

community members? How do we empower them to create 

change and get things done to support their community 

and communities beyond? And how are we really 

shifting the power dynamics so that policy is 

determined by people who are approximate, people who 

have lived experience, and people who can share their 

story and help folks understand? 

 And so I think this is really just a wonderful 

opportunity. I think this just continues to help us 

in our work and truly resonates with what we do with 

AmeriCorps State and National. So thank you so much 

for allowing me to join you all today. 

DR. MCDONALD: Thank you so much, Sonali. Jake? 

SGAMBATI: Yeah, hi, thank you. And good afternoon. I’m 

Deputy Director for AmeriCorps NCCC or the National 

Civilian Community Corps. I think just like Sonali 

said there at the end, we highly value the research, 

the effort, the outputs that we’re getting from 

projects like this because we have a limited and what 
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we believe is an extremely valuable resource for 

community development. And knowing how to utilize it 

in the best way and most effective way possible for 

creating sustainable and effective community 

development work is critical. 

 And so we’ve not only seen success through other 

participatory research grantees, but we continue to 

hope to see new things emerge in partnerships with 

the grantees and with the communities that are doing 

this type of work in the AmeriCorps NCCC program. We 

know sustainable development isn’t easy, so this is 

really important for us to make sure that we’re doing 

the best we can with the limited resources as 

possible. 

 There was some talk earlier about isolation within 

communities. One of the things that I think I heard 

in that too and the alignment with the national 

service is the way in which AmeriCorps service can 

bring people together. We see further and further 

divide across the country, but through service we 

actually see diverse communities, diverse people, 
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diverse groups come together and just exceed the 

amount of success that their counterparts or 

colleagues that are not participating in national 

service are reaching. 

 So we’ve known for years how the impact on community 

development is strong within national service, but 

now we’re understanding how it’s sort of stitching 

some rips across our communities. You know, the 

refugee conversation is relevant to us too at 

AmeriCorps NCCC when we were asked early on by the 

Department of Homeland Security to be – the whole 

agency was asked to be engaged. It was actually a 

very good fit for the AmeriCorps NCCC program model 

for our members to be engaged with Department of 

Homeland Security and with resettlement agencies very 

early on to support Afghan refugees. 

 So we had members serving around the country both 

within the safe havens at military bases as well as 

in communities with resettlement agencies supporting 

refugee work. I think we really see AmeriCorps NCCC 

being best utilized when there are either planned or 
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unplanned surges in work and surges in need that 

won’t have ongoing sustained efforts. So that’s where 

we fit in really well with the safe haven in the 

early activities with Operation Allies Welcome. So we 

were really excited about that. 

 And then as we heard about some of the challenges in 

the whole infrastructure for refugee resettlement, 

refugee support, we also see AmeriCorps NCCC and 

National Service being a good pathway to employment 

to help rekindle and refoster some of those 

resources. Several of our members who have worked on 

refugee projects in the last year have been offered 

jobs for fulltime employment post-service. So we hope 

that the AmeriCorps NCCC model will also be a 

continued good way to not only help develop 

leadership competencies in civic engagement and in 

community development, but also help sort of 

highlight and illuminate new pathways to employment 

as well. 

DR. MCDONALD: Thank you, Jake. And last but not least, 

Jackie. 
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DULUDE: Hi, everyone. Good afternoon and thanks so 

much to the Office of Research and Evaluation for 

allowing me to join and for the presenters, you all 

did a fantastic job. Thank you so much. This research 

is enormously important, as my colleagues have 

mentioned and super fascinating as well in thinking 

about how the work can be applied to our roles. So I 

just wanted to say thank you at the top and I really 

appreciated the framing provided at the beginning as 

well. I think two things kind of stand out there to 

me. 

 First, thinking about how complicated this system is 

for refugees versus asylum seekers and the different 

classifications. And if it’s confusing to us, just 

imagining the state of overwhelming nature of the 

process for our new Americans coming in, and just 

kind of thinking about that and framing it in that 

way makes learning about the research I think a bit 

more digestible as well. 
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 And then also thinking about the – Secondly, thinking 

about just the huge contribution that refugee 

populations are making to this country whether it be 

economically, as Dr. Wright mentioned, or through 

language and just richness of experience, as our 

presenters touched on as well. So just wanting to 

kind of mention that the framing I think definitely 

helps us look through the lens of refugee civic 

engagement in that way. 

 So how does it relate to recruitment or how can civic 

engagement opportunities for refugee populations be 

applied to our recruitment work as they build the 

centralized recruitment model for the agency? This is 

something that you definitely want to keep in mind. 

So I think there’s three kind of main themes that run 

through these presentations that come to mind for me. 

 The first is project development. So thinking about 

recruitment from that work model. And what are the 

projects that are going to inspire people to action 

that are going to make folks of all backgrounds in 

this country want to get involved with service? So 
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how can we kind of identify the opportunities with 

organizations like CARE Cincinnati or the ones that 

our other presenters were mentioning as well? And 

what opportunities can we provide to folks? 

 We know that a lot of our younger generation folks 

are very tuned into the refugee and asylum seeker 

situation, and that headlines and what’s happening 

topically in this country oftentimes inspire folks to 

action. So figuring out how we can connect people 

with these really meaningful opportunities to engage 

with refugee populations on the ground is certainly 

top of mind. And then how do we tell that story and 

elevate the voices? As Sonali was mentioning as well. 

And make sure that folks kind of have that platform 

and that we’re celebrating the diversity of the 

constituencies that we’re serving. 

 The second piece is, where possible, targeting those 

folks that are eligible to serve in our programs for 

AmeriCorps member and AmeriCorps seniors volunteer 

opportunities. I heard Dr. Dutt talking about the 

sort of lack of engagement or lack of ability to find 
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the full work opportunities among highly skilled 

refugees in Cincinnati. That I think connects really 

well with opportunities to get involved in service, 

whether it be through a formal AmeriCorps opportunity 

or through more episodic volunteering in their 

communities as well. So connecting the skills that 

they bring in and all that they have to offer with 

the community needs, and also their need for 

connection. 

 And then thirdly, this is sort of tangentially 

related, but I think it kind of connects with some 

pieces that we were talking about yesterday as well 

with our older volunteer models, and just kind of a 

nice reminder to approach our management of our 

communities that we’re serving of our AmeriCorps 

members, of our AmeriCorps seniors volunteers as 

holistic people, and just keeping their backgrounds, 

their traumas, their needs in mind as we manage them 

and work to foster that community strengthening model 

that is so important. 
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 So fostering the connection. I definitely heard 

themes of challenges around affordable housing, 

around mental health, around isolation that a lot of 

our members and volunteers also are affected by, of 

course in much different circumstances and much 

different degrees, but I think it’s just important to 

kind of keep that whole of wellbeing in mind when 

talking about and thinking about running AmeriCorps 

programming and that feeds into recruitment I think 

in a really big way. So, again, I just wanted to 

thank you all and I appreciate the presentations. 

DR. MCDONALD: Thank you so much to Sonali, Jake, and 

Jackie for joining us today. It was great hearing 

from our program leadership and how that all 

connects. So we’re going to start now with the Q&A 

session. Some of you have already been typing your 

questions, but please continue to ask questions in 

the chat. We can also provide comments or resources 

by typing it in there. 

 Our first question is for Anjali from Shane. He 

asked, did participants in the civic leadership 
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program demonstrate or show any indication that 

they’d carry their connections they made beyond the 

program itself? And did the program create 

sustainable relationships? 

DR. DUTT: Thank you. That’s a really wonderful question. 

And I may not have made it really clear. So we have 

the core team that’s like the CARE Cincinnati folks 

and they have been involved in the research process 

and everything we’ve done ultimately. And then we 

have the separate civic leadership program for 

immigrants and refugees that some of the same people 

have participated in it, but the core researchers 

also help design what that program was going to look 

like. 

 So I’ll answer the question for both scenarios. There 

has definitely been a lot of relationships that have 

formed amongst the core CARE members. And we started 

meeting back in 2018, so there was quite a bit of 

time pre-pandemic I think to develop in-person 

relationships. Some of us have actually continued 

with another project that we’re working on around 
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refugee youth mental health. And I think there’s just 

some real relationships that have developed through 

that process. 

 And then with the Immigrant and Refugee Civic 

Engagement Program that we developed, that was one of 

our actions that come out of the research. It’s 

harder for me to know to what extent real 

relationships formed because it was virtual and 

because it was on Zoom and there just wasn’t as much 

opportunity for some of the community building that I 

think could be so powerful and so meaningful. 

 So in terms of the relationship parts, I’m not 

entirely sure. But another thing that has come out of 

all of it is that we have a WhatsApp group that folks 

can – and so the last cohort finished in the fall 

that we were able to do with this funding for the 

Refugee and Immigrant Civic Leadership Program, 

sorry. But, what’s continued though is a lot of 

dialogue like, every single day practically I have 

messages that come through WhatsApp that people from 

the Civic Leadership Program are responding to, 
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sharing postings about jobs that become available, 

about fairs that are happening, about issues to be 

concerned about. 

 And so there’s a lot of continued serious engagement 

that I think is really phenomenal and then we have 

lots of anecdotal examples of ways that people have 

continue to be engaged including somebody who did end 

up running for city council, which was amazing, he 

didn’t end up winning unfortunately, but he’s just 

starting a political career I think and will get more 

and more engaged over time. 

 But, then there’s also smaller things like, people 

talking about how they have actually reached out to 

their local city council people to report concerns 

that they have in the city. And yeah, it’s a really 

active WhatsApp group. And often, I rarely am the one 

actually posting in it at this point and Bryan posts 

more than I do, but at the end of the day, it’s the 

people who are the program participants who are 

communicating with each other about how to engage. 
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 So there are some smaller things that we’ve noticed 

already and I look forward to staying connected to 

the communities that we’ve been connected with so far 

and to see what manifests over time. Thanks. 

DR. MCDONALD: Thank you. Next we have a question for 

all of you. So Jenna, we can go ahead and start with 

you. Many of you mentioned kind of sharing your 

findings in many places. Jenna, you kind of said you 

had some academic findings coming out. So could you 

share specifically where your results have been 

shared both in academic spaces and outside? And one 

participant wanted to know specifically if any of 

these results were shared with government. So maybe 

to Homeland Security, Congress, the White House to 

sort of inform the immigration policy. So yeah, where 

have your findings been shared? 

DR. CUSHING-LEUBNER: Thank you for that. I’m going to put 

a link into our chat, but I think it’s just the host 

and panelists, so if somebody could move that. So we 

have a few different places that we shared our 

findings. So for instance, one of the things we did 
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in our first year is we worked with a Hmong graphic 

designer and web developer to create an open access 

website, it’s called the Hmong Language Resource Hub. 

And everything that is developed is placed into that 

hub space and everything is free and open to use and 

access and adapt. 

 So all of the curricular materials, all of the 

professional development is recorded, all of the 

standards and guidelines that is created from 

community experts, all of that is placed into that 

website including links to community organizations 

and one of the things that will be growing out from 

there now will be policy documents, white papers, and 

then published research as well. It’s archived sort 

of and disseminated for the community for anybody to 

access. 

 So one of the ways that has also reached a wider 

audience is we’ve begun working also with a Somali 

population in Minnesota in particular, who are 

developing their language reclamation and ethnic 

studies programs as well. So they were using and 
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sharing a lot of these resources. So there’s that 

community site. 

 We also do a lot of community-based events in order 

to do conversational sharing of information and 

sharing resources there. We work together with a – 

like I mentioned before – a Hmong community publisher 

to publish resources bilingually and multidialectally so that anybody can buy these books and 

use them in their classrooms, in their libraries, and 

their families. 

 And we also have created quite a few videos that are 

also shared on YouTube and social media sites. We 

have social media sites, but these are shared out as 

well. These are bilingual videos in Hmong and English 

and in multiple dialects of Hmong sometimes. 

 In terms of academic dissemination. We present at 

conferences that are practitioner focused conferences 

and also community, there’s a Hmong National 

Development Conference that’s sort of an 

interdisciplinary conference, we’ve presented there, 
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we’ve done workshops there. We also present at 

practitioner conferences specifically for educators. 

And some conferences that are designed for kind of 

community members, families, and educators together 

working for transformational change of our 

educational systems in our schools. 

 And then we also present at conferences, more like 

typical academic peer reviewed international 

conferences. So we’ve done those at education focused 

conferences and linguistic conferences. And also 

conferences that focus on Asian American and Asian 

studies. And then we also have a number of 

manuscripts that are either in press or under review 

or in process. So we have two that are in press, 

three under review, and we have seven that are in 

process with our kind of Hmong scholar research team 

that has grown out of this project as well. And those 

are for book chapters and academic journals. 

 We are hoping to also put together a book prospectus 

in about a year and a half, probably, that’ll be - if 

I get sabbatical - my sabbatical project. So I’ll 
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work on that. So those are the shapes. We think about 

dissemination as being community-driven first. And 

academic dissemination, because it takes so long, is 

sort of a second and third tier, but always 

happening. And really because of the kind of 

collaborative approach of our participatory design, 

you know, that becomes the work in the second and 

third phases of our design cycles that I end up 

leading up. 

 Because Pang has always been our community leader and 

now we’ve grown up and mentored up kind of a large 

collection of community leaders from our research 

team. And so then in our second, third, and ongoing 

years together the academic dissemination work has 

really been able to take off because that process 

just takes a lot more time, you know. 

DR. MCDONALD: Absolutely. I loved how you’re thinking 

about community events in that way as a form of 

dissemination, that’s really awesome. And we’ll be 

rooting for your sabbatical. 
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DR. CUSHING-LEUBNER: Thanks. 

DR. MCDONALD: Anjali, would you like to take that 

question as well? Sort of where you’ve disseminated 

your results and how you’re kind of thinking about 

that in your project. 

DR. DUTT: Sure, thank you. Jenna’s responses were really 

inspiring for me to think about some other ideas, so 

thank you. So far, I’ll talk about some of the 

community ways that we’ve disseminated our results as 

well, some of the academic things that we’ve done. 

And I had seen that question earlier, we haven’t gone 

so far as to share this with like the national or 

federal government in any way, but I would love to. 

So as I think through what might that look like, I’m 

certainly inspired by that suggestion. 

 So at the completion of each phase we’ve created 

handouts that we were able to disseminate to refugee 

communities and just to kind of like briefly 

summarize all of our findings. And we also created 

one pagers that we could give to local organizations 
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that support refugees and immigrants. And so that was 

the most important thing for us to do right away. Get 

the findings to the people who are providing direct 

services or having a lot of engagement with refugees 

and immigrants initially and get these findings into 

the community so that the community is armed with 

like, here are the issues that our community is 

facing and here are the strengths that our community 

has. 

 So that was always our first phase. We’ve also 

presented at a number of different local 

opportunities. And whenever those opportunities 

arise, we try and – I think actually we’ve always 

prioritized having refugee members of the CARE team 

be the ones who present the findings. So, for 

example, there’s a group called the Refugee 

Empowerment Initiative, that’s for a number of 

different social support organizations that work with 

refugees and immigrants. We had folks from our team 

share a PowerPoint that they created that goes 

through what the main findings were. 
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 There’s also an opportunity to share some of the 

findings on a local radio station that Bryan had 

setup. And again, we had refugee team members present 

those findings so they could talk about what was most 

important to them and the findings. And that’s been a 

huge priority amongst our team. 

 And then because Cincinnati Compass is really a 

branch of city government in one way or another, we 

have a direct line to the mayor’s office and to city 

council. So our findings have been shared with our 

local mayor, our local city council, and I think that 

that has influenced some of the ways that our local 

government is perceiving the experiences of refugees 

and immigrants because at the end of the day, despite 

the numbers, they’re not exactly the most well 

acknowledged community that exists in Cincinnati. 

 And we’re always excited to think about more ways to 

do this. So hearing suggestions and ideas is really 

inspiring. And then from an academic perspective, we 

have a few published articles and a few more that 

we’re still working on. I think we have three that 
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are out in the world at this moment and then at least 

two more that are currently being written and 

completed that will hopefully go out quite soon. 

 And I’m a psychologist, we’ve been publishing 

predominantly in psychology outlets. But, one thing 

that I want to share is that we were able to get a 

paper with these findings in The Journal of American 

Psychologists, if there’s any other psychologists on 

this team, that’s a really high impact, from the 

traditional ways that researchers measure these 

things. And I wanted to share that because I think a 

lot of the times people are nervous about doing 

participatory research because it feels like it’s 

marginalized within many fields at this point in 

time, but we were able to get into one of the top 

journals doing participatory research and I think 

there’s just growing acceptance in the fields that we 

can do this. 

 And then one of the publications I was most proud of 

is one that we’re looking at the experiences from a 

decolonial perspective. And so we were able to get 
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that out there in a special issues that’s on 

decolonial psychology. And I felt really proud of 

what we were able to create for that one. And in all 

of our publications we’ve included members of refugee 

communities who have been involved in all phases of 

this as our coauthors. 

DR. NARINE: Thanks, Anjali. I am also a social 

psychologist, so kudos to getting published in a high 

impact journal, good for you and the community you’re 

working with, very impressive. So another question 

that we got is, what are some best practices for 

working with refugee and immigrant communities 

interested in civic engagement? And this is for both 

Anjali and Jenna. Jenna, why don’t you go first. 

DR. CUSHING-LEUBNER: Sure. So best practices, could you 

repeat it? Best practices for what? 

DR. NARINE: Best practices for working with refugee and 

immigrant communities interested in civic engagement. 
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DR. CUSHING-LEUBNER: Sure. I mean, I’m not sure that this 

is particularly unique to refugee communities, 

although I think that there is like an augmented 

thing here. But, I would say starting with – I mean, 

I think we talk a lot about relationships when we 

talk about participatory research. And often times 

relationship is kind of like an outcome. So like, 

belonging, being known, and growing relationships is 

an outcome of the research, but we really see a best 

practice around engaging in participatory research 

being relationship building through a trust model and 

a critical trust model, which means trust that 

recognizes, not only current power dynamics and 

differentials, but longstanding power dynamics and 

differentials. 

 So that starting with trust building and 

relationships has to come first, which I think this 

is a very important best practice that our funders of 

research and our academic institutions that value 

this sort of research or want to value this sort of 

research really need to recognize. One of the 

benefits of this particular grant was that it was a 
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multiyear process that recognized that in terms of 

your product outcomes, that relationship and trust 

building needed to be part of the process of 

participatory research. 

 And that sort of understanding of that best practice 

was really instrumental for us to be able to do 

anything. So Pang mentioned that there was some 

skepticism within the community at the beginning. 

Part of that skepticism was because, you know, like, 

for instance, I’m an outsider and I was invited in 

through an existing relationship with Pang, but I 

personally needed to grow and have the benefit of 

growing real relationships over time with many, many 

people. 

 And until that trust began to be sewn, you know, we 

really couldn’t do very much. And there shouldn’t be 

very much done. And part of that also is because 

there are many, many, many histories of institutions 

doing quite a bit of harm by coming in, making shortterm promises, maybe even following through on those 

very short-term promises, and getting out, you know? 
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And even in the form of that this is community 

engagement, you know. Once people don’t need it or 

the funding runs out, it’s gone. 

 And that anxiety, that well-founded anxiety was part 

of our conversations from the very beginning. And 

saying like, well, what happens when your funding is 

gone? Where will we be? What are we really doing 

here? Are we doing favors or are we doing 

transformational change? So best practices have to, I 

think, first and foremost have a theory of change 

that recognizes the historical understanding of trust 

formation that really also recognizes current and 

longstanding power differences that need to be 

attended to and that’s the first part. 

 And the second piece of that, and this was a real 

learning experience for me personally and 

professionally, was to approach this work through an 

abundance, a theory of abundance as well. So it is 

very, very easy to approach things through like 

recognizing what the limitations are and the scarcity 

of funding, and resources, and trust, but being able 
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to say when we were doing participatory research we 

have to find spaces of abundance in order to really 

grow the possibilities that the community has within 

them so that our role in the research, from the 

institutional side, isn’t limiting what is really 

possible within the community. 

DR. NARINE: Great, thank you. Anjali? 

DR. DUTT: Yeah, thanks for that question. And I couldn’t 

agree more, the first thing that popped into my head 

when I heard the question was about taking the time 

to build meaningfully trusting relationships. When we 

first started we tried to be as transparent as 

possible with folks who were involved about what 

could we do, what were the stipulations, what were 

the guidelines of this grant essentially, and what 

would the university kind of impose as barriers 

related to IRBs and things along those lines? 

 But, we tried to share as much as possible. We shared 

our budget, we shared everything that we could 

possibly share that we could think of. And 
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simultaneously talked about we don’t have a research 

question. We have some ideas, we have some curiosity, 

but being really transparent that the goal here was 

to work together to create something from the 

beginning. So all of that was laid out at the 

beginning. There was no misleading people that this 

wasn’t something that was related to research or 

something along those lines. 

 But, we met for several meetings in a row that was 

really just about getting to know each other. 

Deciding, do we all trust each other? Do we actually 

think that this is something that would be a 

meaningful experience for us? And to begin, we had 

dinner at all of our meetings initially. And we tried 

to prioritize refugee and immigrant owned restaurants 

that would cater the dinners. And we would just talk 

about, why are we here? 

 And I think sometimes when we talk about that we kind 

of forget that the researchers want to be building 

trust with each other and with – and by the 

researchers I mean the faculty and the people on the 
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grant officially. We needed to build trust amongst 

each other too and we need to make it clear like 

we’re not here just because we’re researchers. I 

mean, I do have to publish papers to keep my job, but 

why do I study the things that I do? What are my own 

connections to immigrants? My father is an immigrant, 

I have my own connections to that, and kind of 

sharing some of those stories about like, why does 

this mean to something to us? Is it just like a job, 

is it just a paycheck, or is there something deeper? 

 And so we had that time to connect with each other 

and determine is this something that folks really 

want to do. And I think that that set this tone for 

us to really have, to create a culture amongst each 

other, and decide what we want to do. So that part I 

think is critically important, and I couldn’t agree 

more with everything that Jenna said, and the 

importance of that particularly in the context of the 

exploitation that’s happened to marginalized 

communities by researchers over and over and over 

again, repeatedly. The University of Cincinnati has 

its own history of oppressive research practices that 
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have occurred with marginalized communities. So our 

transparency and how we’re going to work past. 

 The second thing that was really powerful to me was 

that we worked with an intentionally diverse group of 

refugee community members. Obviously refugees are an 

incredibly diverse group of people and even within an 

ethnic or racial community there’s quite a bit of 

diversity, of course, that’s really obvious. And 

prior to this project, any community engaged project 

I had been involved in worked explicitly with one 

community. And I found that really enriching and we 

can develop really deep and meaningful relationships 

and it was something I was really proud of. 

 This time though we intentionally wanted to connect 

with refugees across communities and that was 

something I was genuinely intimidated by because of 

the linguistic challenges, because of refugee 

communities don’t always – You know, there’s no 

guarantee you’re all connected to each other. And yet 

I was, you know – We had our reasons for why we felt 

like that should at least be our first attempt. And I 
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was so blown away by how meaningful that connection 

was to everybody. That’s something that we ended up 

writing about. 

 I didn’t share this before, but we did have 

interpreters. When we were initially bringing 

together our team, we did ask that people have some 

degree of comfort with English language, but that 

wasn’t a requirement for really being engaged, but 

just given how many communities we were working with, 

it was necessary to really think deeply about how 

meaningful is our communication going to be and our 

ability to connect with each other. So everybody had 

some degree of comfort, but we had interpreters for 

French and Arabic at all of our meetings. 

 And when I think about best practices, I don’t know 

how exactly to phrase it and I think it does require 

a lot of time, a lot of ability to get to know each 

other, but I wouldn’t ever be afraid again to do a 

more, to shy away from putting limitations on who can 

be involved based on the communities that you’re a 

part of. Because everyone on the team, we did 
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interviews with everyone who was on the team at one 

point and we published about that, talked about how 

powerful it was to hear about other people’s ways of 

navigating life, of dealing with the same challenges, 

but coming up with their own creative communityoriented solutions to it, and those experiences of 

connection I think were so powerful and so inspiring 

that to me it was really valuable. 

DR. NARINE: Thank you. Thank you both so much. Before we 

wrap our webinar, I’m going to pass the mic to the 

Director of the Office of Research and Evaluation, 

Dr. Mary Hyde. 

DR. HYDE: Thank you, Victoria, and thank you everyone 

for your participation today. I joined the 

conversation late today because I was giving remarks 

at my mentor Dr. Ken Maton’s retirement party this 

morning. I’m also a community psychologist, Ken was 

my mentor as a graduate student, he continues to be 

my hero. And I have to say that listening to your 

presentations and your work today is really feeling 

like a full circle moment for me. 
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 I was in a physical room and in a Zoom room with all 

of his students that were able to participate, and he 

was at UMBC for 38 years, but I was in a room of 

community psychologists who talked about preserving 

their cultural heritage in the Philippines, who 

talked about being an immigrant from Turkey and 

coming to this country to study with Ken, and now 

he’s in Sweden doing work on integration of 

immigrants into different communities, and access to 

different aspects of economic, social, and civic 

life. 

 I was in the room with a former classmate who has 

been working on research that promotes educational 

access in countries like Haiti and Madagascar. I was 

in the room with former students and colleagues of 

Ken who are doing trauma-informed clinical work 

because of intergenerational violence. And it was 

just a reminder to me that this work, this communitybased research, this community-based community 

development has been a theme of my career and clearly 

your careers. And I think that dialogues like today, 
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dialogues like yesterday, and the dialogue we’ll have 

tomorrow really do speak to the power of diversity, 

equity, inclusion, and access. 

 We heard about research with older Americans in rural 

communities. Today we heard about refugees and 

immigrants. And these are all communities that often 

do not have access and who are not included, as you 

all well know. The power of being seen, and being 

heard, and having a voice at the table, and a seat at 

the table leads us to creating spaces and places 

where all can contribute to their community. And I 

haven’t had a day in a long time like today where 

there have been so many reminders and so many 

concrete examples of the critical importance of 

promoting and protecting the inclusion of everyone. 

 I think Jenna said the theory of abundance, the 

strength based approach, that was also a theme I 

heard all morning long, as different community 

psychologists talked about their research and their 

practice. And I think that that cannot be overstated 

without the promotion and protection of creating an 
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inclusive place for everyone. We risk weakening our 

social fabric, we risk diluting the potential of 

community solutions, and fundamentally we put 

democracy at risk. 

 So I can’t thank you all enough for the work that 

you’re doing. I can’t express what a privilege it is 

to be a part of this work in even the most remote 

ways. I thank my colleagues at AmeriCorps for the 

reflections because we feel that national service is 

such an important part of this story, this social 

fabric of inclusion. And I thank my team for 

facilitating today’s conversation. So thank you for 

being here. Thank you for the work that you’re doing 

and I appreciate it very much. So with that, I’ll 

pass it back. 

DR. NARINE: Thanks, Mary. So before we end day two of our 

research dialogue, let’s hear some final thoughts 

from our wonderful speakers. I will go to Jake first. 

Jake, any closing thoughts? 
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SGAMBATI: Just once again, thank you all for letting me 

participate and listen in to a lot of the great work 

that’s happening. I just know that the work that’s 

happening here through your research, through your 

engagement, through your strengthening communities, 

just consider how we can help from AmeriCorps NCCC to 

continue to enhance that work, expand that work, 

deepen it. We’ve seen some successes through similar 

projects happening in Nevada, but hope we can 

continue to build on your successes to help us better 

utilize our resources here at AmeriCorps. So thank 

you all. It’s been great. 

DR. NARINE: Thanks, Jake. Jenna, any closing thoughts? 

DR. CUSHING-LEUBNER: I actually want to piggyback off of 

something that Anjali talked about which, you know, 

there are lots of reasons why people can feel very 

isolated today, not today, but like in general, 

today. And that isolation can also be felt acutely 

within our displaced communities and I’m trying to 

represent what’s been shared with me from our Hmong 

team because Pang is back teaching. But, creating 
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opportunities and space for constellations of 

refugee, and immigrant, and asylum seeking 

communities to really find community with one another 

while they do their own work is really, really 

powerful. 

 And having the opportunity to be able to say like, 

what are we doing together? And how can what we’re 

doing resonate with other groups of people who are 

also trying really hard to find a space of thriving? 

Is really so powerful and I think things like this 

can really have a huge, huge impact when we think of 

how to talk across sometimes very wide distances and 

disciplinary distances too. 

DR. NARINE: Thank you. And finally, Anjali. 

DR. DUTT: Thanks. When the question was posed, one of 

the things that just initially popped into my mind is 

that there are more refugees now in the world than 

there have ever been since we started counting the 

number of refugees who exist and there’s even far 

more internally displaced people, people who are 
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deserving, according to many, the title of refugee 

but haven’t gotten the political label yet. 

 And this number is growing. And I think there’s so 

many reasons that I think a lot of understand that 

the world is getting increasingly precarious and that 

we’re going to see more refugees in the coming years 

from the crisis in Ukraine, the crisis in 

Afghanistan, and whatever will unfold related to 

climate justice. And so I think beyond even just 

thinking about the research, I just think it’s 

incredibly important for us to be thinking about, how 

do we create a just world? 

 Most people don’t want to be leaving their homes of 

origins, but they’re forced to do so. So I think 

there just needs to be something where we’re really 

collectively thinking about how can we try to create 

just environments for folks when they’re leaving such 

atrocious realities. And we just really as – I think 

it’s fantastic to see how many people are here today 

to learn about what we’ve been doing. It’s really 

wonderful and inspiring, but we all I think know that 
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we are up against so much and we need to be really 

working together as a team. 

 And thinking about Jenna was just saying about this 

isolation, that so many of us have experienced in the 

past two years, and how displaced communities know 

that probably in a deeper way than I can possibly 

imagine at this point. We need to be keeping each 

other afloat and encouraging each other to think more 

deeply, and expand and grow our capacities to create 

a more just environment for refugees and all 

marginalized communities. That’s I think the 

challenge of our contemporary era. 

DR. NARINE: Thank you. Yeah, I think I speak for everybody 

on the call today that we all loved your 

presentations and we are completely inspired by the 

work that you and your community partners are doing. 

So thank you so much. And I’m going to pass the mic 

to Katy to close us out. 

HUSSEY-SLONIKER: So thank you very much for attending 

today’s session. We want to thank our speakers for 
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their presentations and reflections to our audience 

today for a great discussion. We cannot forget to 

thank our webinar facilitation team for their 

assistance, that would be ICF Next. Their staff 

Larisa Crewalk, Alexandra Owens, and Jenelle Azore, 

and their colleagues for their technical support and 

coordination. Tomorrow we will focus on African 

American youth and civic engagement. Please click on 

the link if you would like to register for the next 

day’s events. Thank you and have a wonderful rest of 

your day. 

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