If you are a college student or 20-something who wants to help promote a warm American welcome for refugees in the United States, you may be interested in volunteering as a RefAmerica counselor, management team member and near-peer mentor. In summer 2020, RefAmerica will again be running its one-month (June 26 – July 26) summer program for: six - ten recently resettled refugee high school students drawn from around the U.S. and six - ten comparably aged American high school students from Montgomery County, MD, and surrounding areas.
RefAmerica is a program in leadership, public-speaking, cross-cultural understanding, and the narrative method. Participants have the opportunity to get to know Washington DC; to learn more about American immigrant stories; to engage in a unique cross-cultural program of sharing traditions, team-building experiences, and personal stories; to explore their own roles within a greater American story of immigration and integration; and to plan ways to welcome refugees and promote cross-cultural understanding in their home communities. Participants visit key Washington sites and share their stories at speaking events, in meetings with government, think tank, and international organization representatives, and on Capitol Hill. The goal of RefAmerica is to promote full inclusion of recently arrived refugees in America and provide small groups of participant refugees with the tools both to tell their stories and to help forge for themselves, their families and their fellow refugees, like generations of Americans before them, a new American story. We rely also on the power of personal narrative to help foster a warm American welcome for refugees.
A RefAmerica counselor/management team member would help chaperone and coordinate team activities; communicate and coordinate with venues, host parents, event guests, donors, and participants; help with speech prep, participate in team activities; help with event set-up and fund-raising; serve as a near-peer mentor,and more. We are looking for someone who can volunteer part-time in June and August and full-time in July. We are particularly interested in considering outgoing, responsible and reliable individuals with volunteer, counseling, and cross-cultural experience and with strong people skills and compassion. We are happy to assume the supervision and reporting responsibilities for a college internship.
