College Hosts Panel on Local Refugee Resettlement

Julia Gentin ’26 Senior Staff Writer

Natalie Rubanska just started a job in Amherst, 5,000 miles away from her home town of Kharkiv, Ukraine. Even though it’s been a year since her departure, Rubanska still constantly asks herself, “What am I doing here?”

Rubanska spoke on Tuesday, Feb. 7, at an event titled “Refugee Settlement in the Pioneer Valley: A Panel Discussion of Process, Challenges, and Client Experiences,” sponsored by the college’s Center for Religious and Spiritual Life and its Office of Immigration Services.

Rubanska served as a panelist along with Urszula Wolanska-Fettes and Kathryn Buckley-Brawner from Catholic Charities and Sara Bedford from Jewish Family Services of Western Massachusetts (JFS). They defined relevant terms describing displaced persons, gave statistics on the refugee crisis, explained the resettlement process from the international to local level, and offered anecdotes from clients.

The event is particularly pertinent in the context of ongoing global humanitarian crises, including those in Afghanistan and Ukraine, Buckley-Brawner said.

Before 2022, there were 44.7 million displaced persons and 26.6 million refugees globally while as of 2022, the global number increased to 100 million displaced persons and 32.5 million refugees, Fettes said.

Bedford drew from her 17 years of experience to respond to turmoil caused by the Afghan evacuation in addition to other crises.

The center, which Bedford said had been “shriveled like a raisin” before the current crises,