Under the agreement, Guilford will help train and certify U.S. colleges interested in helping refugee students.
Refugees will soon have a new path to U.S. colleges, and Guilford’s Every Campus A Refuge will play a large role in preparing schools for the refugees.
The Welcome Corps on Campus, a new plan backed by the U.S. State Department, will enable qualified students to resettle in the United States, enroll at participating colleges, and obtain legal permanent residency, with the opportunity to apply for U.S. citizenship. ECAR was chosen to help certify schools interested in participating in the plan.
Diya Abdo, the Lincoln Financial Professor of English in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Guilford is the Director of ECAR, which has two houses on campus in which refugees reside.
She says the initiative is “a step in the right direction” towards higher education playing a “significant role” in refugee welcome, protection and integration.
“From the refugees who experience a stronger beginning in their new home, to the campus community who is transformed by the power of the connections made, to the local community who benefits immensely from the contributions of its newest Americans, Welcome Corps on Campus will be a win-win for all involved,” says Diya.
The new program will allow groups of Americans to privately sponsor refugee students attending college. The effort is meant to provide refugees with two things nearly all of them lack: access to postsecondary education and certainty about where they will live in the future.
International students attending U.S. colleges on visas aren’t eligible for federal aid. But as refugees, students in the program would be eligible. And they would also be permitted to work.
ECAR was founded in 2015 and now has 14 chapters up and running at colleges across the nation. The mission of ECAR calls on colleges and universities to partner with local refugee resettlement agencies to house refugees on campus grounds and assist them in resettlement.
The idea is that university and college campuses have everything necessary — housing, food, care, skills – to take in refugees and support them as they begin lives in their new homes.