The Refugee Services Collaborative of Greater Cleveland (RSC) thanks all those who attended the 2019 Great Lakes Conference on Refugee Resilience and Integration: Promising Practices, Emerging Trends!
On November 14 and 15, we welcomed more than two hundred people to the conference, held at the Wolstein Center at Cleveland State University, with people traveling from all over the country. Attendees came from such states as Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Texas. These attendees represented a wide variety of fields, including refugee resettlement, social work, education and youth, government, and healthcare.
The idea for the conference grew out of the desire to address the international refugee resettlement crisis. Our goal was to bring together professional practitioners from around the country to discuss the challenges facing the integration of vulnerable refugee communities today, exchange new and best practices that address those challenges, and examine emerging solutions underway across the nation.
For those that were unable to attend this conference, here are some highlights of the event:
- Safia Elhillo (poet and author of The January Children) read her poetry and answered questions regarding her experiences as a Sudanese American woman.
- Loung Ung (refugee and author of First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers) discussed her life as a refugee in the United States after escaping the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in a fireside chat interview.
- Jason Stearns (assistant professor at the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University, director of the Congo Research Group at New York University, and author of Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa) gave a presentation on the history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
- Dr. Cecilia Tsu (associate professor of history at the University of California, Davis and author of Garden of the World: Asian Immigrants and the Making of Agriculture in California’s Santa Clara Valley) gave a presentation on the U.S. refugee resettlement policy in historical perspective.
- Many conference attendees had a chance to socialize and see a performance of a play called Cartography at Playhouse Square.
