Resettled in Vermont

On September 16, about a month after harrowing images circulated from Afghanistan documenting the collapse of its government under the Taliban, Governor Phil Scott announced that Vermont would welcome one hundred Afghan refugees to resettle in the Green Mountain State. Since then, that number has grown to upwards of 175.

Depending on your relationship to Vermont, this news may surprise you. The second least populated state behind Wyoming and the second whitest state behind Maine—not to mention its notorious winters—Vermont may not seem like an obvious place to resettle families and individuals fleeing from diverse conflicts around the world.

But it’s part of a long tradition—or rather, it’s a return to a long tradition by the state. In the past forty years, an estimated 8,000 refugees have resettled in Vermont—particularly in the seventeen square miles that surround the University of Vermont and comprise the cities of Burlington and Winooski within Chittenden County.

To put that number into context of current times, 386 refugees resettled in Vermont in 2016—no small feat for a little state like ours. But before the pandemic hit in 2019, only 114 people were resettled. In 2020, that number plummeted to 23. “What had happened between 2016 and 2020 had been a pretty brutal evisceration of the existing refugee program,” says Pablo Bose, director of the University’s Global and Regional Studies Program, Gund Institute Fellow, and expert on refugees and migration.

The wave of Afghans coming now to Vermont—which will be at least four times the size of last years’ refugees—signals not only a sea change in global migration policy, but also that the “Welcome” sign in the Green Mountain State is still up, and its doors still open to the new voices and experiences of our neighbors around the world.

— Story by Kaitie Catania • Photos by Andy Duback —

From her family’s garden plot at AALV’s New Farms for New Americans, Mon Moti Rai harvests caigua and hyacinth beans. In keeping with agrarian traditions, the farm’s plots allow New American families like Rai’s to farm with friends and other family members throughout the growing season.

"You have to be able to resettle people into opportunity,” Bose says. Regardless of citizenship or legal status, the foundation for the kinds of opportunities he’s referring to typically requires access to housing, transportation, medical care, education, food, and social services— the basics, Bose says. “Resettling people in a way that’s not going to ensure their success is not a good recipe for anyone—first and foremost, not for the refugees—and it’s not a good recipe for the places that receive them.”

In a coolly quaint town across the river from Burlington, the residents of Winooski have been perfecting their own recipe for decades. Celebrated by Vermonters as the state’s most diverse town, the 1.5 square miles of Winooski are home to everyone from lifetime Vermonters and transplants to refugees and immigrants from Bhutan, Somalia, and Iraq—to name a few countries of origin. In fact, in 2018 the Winooski School District educated students from twenty-five different countries, speaking nineteen different languages— known as multilingual learners, or ML students, by faculty and staff at Winooski Middle and High School.

“The term ‘ML’ has come from some conversation and deep reflection on the deficit of calling students ‘English language learners.’ We really want to acknowledge that—in many cases—these students are speaking more than one language when they come to us; it just may not be English,” explains Thomas Payeur ’10, G’12, a math teacher at the school and the 2019 Vermont Teacher of the Year.

His school has translators and interpreters on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, “speaking many different languages,” Payeur says, “I couldn’t even name them all.” Winooski Middle and High School also has an intake coordinator on staff dedicated to solely working with parents, teachers, translators, and interpreters to place ML students in classes appropriate for their learning levels. They communicate with teachers about potential absences and appointments—including medical and legal—that can often disrupt ML students’ learning or class time.

If Winooski Middle and High School doesn’t sound like the average American public school, it’s because it’s the product of an increasingly popular educational framework known as a community school, Payeur explains, which supports not only academic success and education, but also essential needs and holistic development of its student. Community schools like this one in Winooski are designed with the kinds of opportunities in mind that Bose described earlier. “It’s getting a lot of traction in the State House and at the federal level,” Payeur says.

And back across the river in Burlington—a bigger, slightly less diverse town that’s welcomed twice as many refugees over the past twenty years as their northern neighbors across the river to an area seven times larger—public schools share a similar framework. But where the school district’s capacity to bring New American and refugee services in-house like Winooski Middle and High School maxes out, community partners step in to meet those students and families where they are. Leading that charge is the Association of Africans Living in Vermont (AALV)—the state’s largest nonprofit agency serving refugees and migrants.

“To be honest, we do everything,” says AALV youth program coordinator and case manager Samuel Dingba ’19, G’20. Working alongside Vermont’s federal agency for acute support, AALV serves refugees and migrants, regardless of their country of origin (not just Africans, as the acronym suggests), with long-term resettlement efforts. “If there’s a family that needs to move, guess who’s helping them? AALV is helping them. If there’s a family that needs food, needs to go to the hospital, or to immigration services, guess who’s taking them? AALV is taking them,” says Dingba, an immigrant himself.

At age 16, the former Catamount basketball player came to the United States from Cameroon on a scholarship to an all-boys boarding school in Connecticut. It was an otherworldly experience for the young Dingba, coming to a small town in New England from a big city across the Atlantic. “It was completely different. A different vibe, different environment, different food and climate. When I came, it was already cold, I thought, ‘wow, I am not prepared for this’. But I did it and I managed that,” he says.

Pablo Bose

Burundian farmers examine blue sesame seeds, planted this summer in the Teacher’s Demonstration Garden—part of a three-year grant from the USDA to grow culturally significant crops and explore urban agriculture. The blue sesame did very well, but yielded a relatively small harvest compared to other crops—not the best use of real estate in a small 25-foot by 100-foot household plot.

Intern Evie Wolfe ’21 tends to a trellis of caigua fruit, a thumb-sized vegetable with spiky flesh that tastes like cucumber and is either eaten raw or prepared in a curry. Because caigua grows upwards of 30 feet, farmers gather downed trees from surrounding forests to repurpose into stakes for the plants to climb.

Now in his capacity as a youth program coordinator for AALV, he gets to be the mentor he wishes he had not too long ago as a New American teenager in New England himself. Having earned a BA in Political Science and a Master of Public Administration from UVM, Dingba emphasizes to students in his program, as well as their parents and families, the importance of academic excellence at this stage in their lives.

And in true “we do everything” fashion, Dingba really does do all he can to serve the adolescents he works with. From tutoring, CPR training, and fostering comfortable environments where learning can happen, to offering workshops on skill development, career readiness, mental and sexual health, navigating the US education system, and even hygiene—whatever they need, Dingba is there to help. That includes the occasional show of support and tapping into his Catamount basketball roots at their own sporting events where he’s there to rally behind them. “I’m trying to make them leaders in our community by trying to empower them in all aspects," he says. “I want to be sure that, one: they know they have a safe place to go to; and two: that they can always come to me or AALV and get the help they need to succeed— because we all went through it at AALV.”

Meanwhile, at the combined middle and high school where Payeur teaches math, construction is underwayto expand upon the school’s existing onsite services, such as a health clinic that can accommodate those medical appointments for students, “so they don’t become major disruptions to learning,” Payeur says. “As soon as this construction is finished next year, there’s going to be an onsite free store where people can go through the process of ‘purchasing’ things, like clothing and possibly food, without using actual money.”

While these initiatives and efforts are major points of pride for the Winooski community, they were (and continue to be) major pain points of the pandemic, especially for families in this community. When the school pivoted to online learning, Payeur says the amazing resiliency and accomplishments of his students were met equally with “soul crushing experiences” and worry.

The pandemic revealed just how disproportionately New Americans are affected by the limitations or complete elimination of basic needs and services like transportation and employment. For Professor Bose, one of the most glaring issues was food insecurity. Tapped by the Vermont Foodbank to evaluate a boxed delivery system they implemented in response to the pandemic, Bose confirmed what the foodbank had noticed: a substantial amount of food was not being taken or used by this community.

“It became clear that some of what was being delivered to people were not their preferred foods or foods that they were familiar with—that was a bigger issue

than preference, stuff that they didn’t know how to cook or how to prepare,” he says.

The foodbank course-corrected its operation by delivering food boxes filled with fresh vegetables and produce, and “people loved it,” Bose says. “That was one of the things we found—that people were interested in these food boxes, but weren’t really interested in the kinds of foods being delivered to them.”

Up in the New North End’s Ethan Allen Homestead, a modest farm just over seven acres and a small team of dedicated staff and volunteers, including a couple UVM interns, are digging—literally—much deeper into the root issues of food insecurity. New Farms for New Americans (NFNA) is a community-based gardening and agriculture program by AALV that provides refugee and immigrant farmers with plots, training, and the necessary education to sustain their agrarian traditions in Vermont—all while growing healthy, nutritious foods for their families and neighbors.

Intern Evie Wolfe ’23 is among the many UVM-affiliated hands helping to sustain roughly ninety plots—each one-sixteenth an acre—leased seasonally and affordably to New Americans to grow what they wish: flowers, fruits, vegetables. “There are a lot of different Nepali crops that I hadn’t heard of and crops that I’m used to seeing, but in different varieties. Like different heads of eggplant, different cucumbers, different squash I’d never seen,” says the global studies and religion double major.

Wolfe’s supervisor and farm manager Alisha Laramee estimates that there are at least twenty-five culturally significant crops being grown at NFNA, the kind “that you can’t buy locally or, if you can, many people we work with are not used to buying vegetables on a shelf in a store. AALV’s clients are much more used to growing food for themselves or buying from vendors similar to a farmers’ market,” Laramee says.

Turns out, it’s also more affordable to grow them in the garden rather than grab them off the shelf—a lot more affordable. Some 300 farmers harvest an average of 700 pounds of food at NFNA to feed their families or to store through the winter. “If we were to put a monetary value on how much food was harvested, it would be over $250,000 worth of produce being harvested off our small seven acres of land. It’s amazing,” she says.

For as much as it provides access to land and the resources required to farm on their own, NFNA also provides farmers a place for community building. Over the years, a network of seed sharing between farmers has brought them together around best practices for growing in Vermont and culturally significant produce that improves crop diversity for the farm. For Wolfe—who sees herself becoming a professor one day or developing a career in food security or refugee resettlement—this has been an interesting topic to research.

“I really love seeing the communal structure of seed sharing. It’s so important for access to culturally significant crops and how people acclimate to a new place—how they have foods that they know how to eat, prepare, and feed to their families. There are a lot of really important communal implications for Burlington’s refugee community,” Wolfe says.

Today, NFNA supports subsistence farming only, but the model AALV began with in 2008 looked slightly different when the farm first launched. Laramee recalls the program being much more business-focused back then, offering plots as well as classes on farming, sales, insurance, and business that farmers could take to “graduate” from the program.

But those “graduations” just weren’t happening, Laramee noticed, so she asked the farmers what they wanted instead—and she listened. Their own plots; the freedom to farm whatever they wanted; and most importantly, the ability to farm for themselves, not for profit or as a small business. AALV made it happen. Now Wolfe supports Laramee and staff from the Vermont Community Garden Network facilitate weekly educational classes about topics like how to grow in Vermont’s short season and what pests and diseases to look out for.

“Humility comes with a lot of listening and trying to understand. I think that’s the importance of what is happening here. When students come here, they spend time listening to what’s happening in the lives of the clients we have,” she says.

Listening. This is the key to a successful, supportive partnership with Vermont’s refugee community, according to Laramee. Having been with AALV at the farm for more than a decade, she says it’s also a strength she’s come to notice across the UVM community—students and faculty alike—that she’s worked with in that time.

“Humility comes with a lot

of listening and trying to understand. I think that’s the importance of what is happening here. When students come here, they spend time listening to what’s happening in the lives of the clients we have.”

- Alisha Laramee

Manager, New Farms for New Americans AALV

“We see this amazing connection between the University that is not necessarily just extractive, focused on what this does for the university—but what it does for a population of people. There’s real partnership and collaboration with people like Pablo Bose and Karen Fondacaro, for example. People who are on the ground with us and know what’s happening, not just in the theoretical sense, but in our clients’ lives—people who are invested in our clients.”

And when it comes to listening and hearing about the lives and experiences of Vermont’s refugees, few do it better than Karen Fondacaro G’88 and her team at the Connecting Cultures clinic. Under the umbrella of UVM’s Vermont Psychological Services, the clinic provides mental health support and services to resettled survivors of torture and trauma. Like Bose, Fondacaro was tapped for her expertise working with victims of domestic violence and abuse to help address a growing need identified by the state with the influx of more and more refugees.

“At the time in 2007, the refugee population was not seeking out mental health services at all, but we knew they had gone through political atrocities and horrible trauma. I think we realized early on that we had to go to them; they weren’t going to come to mental health centers,” recalls Fondacaro, a professor of clinical psychology and director of Connecting Cultures.

“We didn’t even know what their view of mental health and well-being was at the time, so I started by going to weddings and funerals, just getting to know the communities with a number of graduate students.”

It was tough in the beginning, but Fondacaro echoes Laramee and emphasizes the importance of listening. It took interpreters, time, and trust—not to mention an incredible amount of cultural competency and patience—to develop a program with ten modules of care centered around health, safety, values, and acceptance that can be understood as healing rather than “fixing” across cultures and backgrounds.

“We really try to take a different approach, which is asking, ‘What’s important to you? And despite all the horrific things that you’ve gone through, how do you want to move through this world?’ Because if someone is telling me they lost a child, they may be sad about this loss for the rest of their life—and I don’t think that’s ever going to change. But do they want to give up their life also?” Today, the clinic has served hundreds of clients and has grown to incorporate legal services, social services, and even physical therapy.

“We realized quickly that psychology is not the only answer; it’s too unidimensional. The services or assistance required for success are beyond that,” she says. The clinic even has a satellite office at AALV, where it may be more comfortable, understandably, for patients to discuss the kinds of personal tragedies, grief, loss, violence, and torture they’ve experienced.

Their next frontier: patients’ pockets—or at least their phones and tablets. Fondacaro and colleagues at the New England Survivors of Torture and Trauma, along with a team of software developers and cultural consultants, are working on a language-free app that follows Connecting Cultures’ ten modules of evidence-based treatment, making access to mental health resources for refugees and immigrants more accessible between clinic sessions. A pilot study of the app found that the use of a mobile mental health app, in combination with in-person therapy, was effective in reducing mental health symptomology and in increasing the use of coping skills among participants.

But it’s the language-free component that sets the app apart from other mindfulness apps currently available. It prompts users to customize their own avatar with skin color, hair styles, and culturally or religiously significant identifiers such as hijabs or bindis that visually reflect who they are and how they see themselves. The app helps users track their emotions using facial expressions, and offers mindfulness activities and guided exercises such as breathing and relaxation.

However the greatest innovation here isn’t a feature on the app, but rather it’s the cost of the app: free. It’s been created to address barriers like transportation, affordable health care, and English proficiency that account for much of the disparity among mental health services for refugees. “We’ll meet people wherever the heck they are, because that’s part of being more culturally responsive,” Fondacaro says.

Intern Evie Wolfe and farm manager Alisha Laramee check-in with a farmer who recently completed a 28-week urban agriculture program funded by a grant from the Department of Agriculture and offered in partnership with Vermont Community Garden Network. Among hundreds of applicants nationwide, AALV was one of only seven grant recipients.

And soon, the Connecting Cultures team may be finding themselves meeting people in Brattleboro more often. About 130 miles south of Burlington, Brattleboro is home to Vermont’s new refugee resettlement field office, the second in the state that opened this fall. Of the Afghan refugees coming to Vermont, some twenty-five to seventy-five will be resettled in Brattleboro.

“In many cases, places like Brattleboro are aging and their youth are migrating out of the state, and they’re losing workers. They have, for a long time, seen the success and benefits of resettlement in places like Burlington and said, ‘Okay, well, how could we make this happen here?’” says Bose, whose been an integral part of getting the office up and running while taking a step back from teaching this semester to oversee implementation of a new curricula, UVM’s Catamount Core Curriculum.

And as the Brattleboro community and the field office find their footing, Bose looks forward to focusing some of his research attention to how the “success” of resettlements is evaluated. Right now, the standard metric is employment over time—for example, 90 days after resettlement, 180 days, etc., what does their employment status look like?

“What I have been advocating for in my research is understanding resettlement in a more holistic way, looking at other factors like transportation, education, employment, housing, and civic integration,” he says. The Brattleboro office will pilot Bose’s new evaluation, which measures whether or not hopes and expectation are met over time by New Americans—and if so, how.

“In the first three months of arrival, I asked people what it was that they were hoping for: how large a house, how many bedrooms, and how much they’d hoped to pay in rent versus how much they’d hope to earn?” A year later, they will be asked those same questions to find out what happened. The idea being that a more individualized definition of success will likely produce more comprehensive evaluations and meaningful feedback to improve upon.

The 2021 George V. Kidder Outstanding Faculty Award-winner for excellence in teaching, Bose is also very much looking forward to returning to his classroom this spring—and so are his colleagues and students. “He is a hero,” says Dingba, the youth program coordinator at AALV, despite not having taken any classes of Bose’s while at UVM. It was a conversation with Chris Koliba, director of UVM’s Office of Engagement and Master Public Administration graduate program, that led the former political science student to Bose early on in his graduate studies.

“I said, ‘Well, I actually want to work with immigrants one day, because I am also an immigrant myself,’” Dingba recalls, with no knowledge at the time about AALV or its services. “And he said, ‘Yeah, go talk to Pablo.’” It was this relationship that pivoted his trajectory entirely. Now Dingba hopes to work someday with the United Nations—a privilege Bose has had on multiple occasions as well-respected expert on migration, resettlement, and displacement—to tackle pressing issues that can cause migration and displacement: climate change, political persecution, genocide, and war to name a few.

“There is a much more urgent sense especially among youth and younger people in general, that these issues aren’t something that can be forever put off and that they ought not to be put off,” Bose says. “We’ve seen youth across the country, K through 12, to the university systems, push for changes to be made rather than waiting for things to come around—and that’s something that gives me hope.” UVM

Over in the demonstration garden, alumna Quinn DiFalco ’21 (third from left) discusses the process, varieties, and importance of planting cover crops.