The Every Campus A Refuge (ECAR) – Refugee Resettlement Initiative
The First-Gen+ Center has partnered up with Every Campus A Refuge (ECAR) and the National Association for System Heads (NASH) Refugee Resettlement Initiative (RRI) to offer a FREE, certificate-bearing “training-of-trainers” program entitled, “Creating Inclusive Communities Together: Transforming Higher Education Through Refugee Integration.”
Who is this training for? This training is for higher education champions of refugee resettlement and integration, from DEI leaders and admissions officers
to faculty and students.
How is this training grounded? The training is grounded in a commitment to transforming the landscape of higher education and refugee resettlement by developing thousands of sustainable resettlement campuses that offer innovative and powerful educational opportunities for U.S. students while centering the agency and dignity of refugees.
The training has five modules, which have been designed to be participatory, interactive, and action-driven with the goals of:
- Enriching your knowledge on forced migration and refugee resettlement;
- Empowering you to see the possibilities for your institution in refugee resettlement and integration support and related transformative curricular and co-curricular programming; and
- Equipping you with the tools to create a campus welcoming to refugees.
The activities that punctuate the training will allow you and your colleagues to: Check Your Knowledge; Reflect on your Learning; Apply Best Practices; and Develop an Action Plan.
Upon completion of the eight-hour training, and submission of your Action Plan, you can receive certification, as well as follow up support and membership in a Community of Practice.
How will this training be most useful? This training is designed to prepare participants with the information, concepts, framework, and skills for action-planning at prospective resettlement campuses. We want you to leave this training with an initial plan for building capacity to welcome and host refugees and prepare you as a champion/messenger within your campus and other campuses in your system. This involves working with your cohort to apply learnings from the training to collectively create an Action Plan relevant for your campus/system, including mapping the ecosystem of people, relationships, resource, and opportunities available, creating common messaging, as well as foreshadowing needs. We want you to leave this training ready to build capacity before developing the infrastructure needed to host refugees – a resettlement campus ecosystem, our North Star.