At the Crystal Cove Apartments* in Phoenix, the different cultures and creeds are severely evident.
The complex is busy with activity. African families walk by to check their mail, an Indian man strolls by. Two Asian children play in the grass, greeting everyone who walks by with a loud “Hello.”
“It is the Americans who want to keep everything behind their walls,” says Sanja Buha, who goes on to explain how people from other countries like to be outside to see others and interact with neighbors.
Buha is the operations director on the Leadership Team for Community Outreach and Advocacy for Refugees, or COAR.
The Crystal Cove Apartments is the home of the Sakilahs, a Liberian refugee family who arrived in Phoenix in July. The father, Augustine, speaks English, and the mother, Bendu, a shy, soft-spoken woman, is learning. Salvanus, 5, is their son. Massa, 14, is the mother’s little sister and Fatu, 11, is the father’s cousin. All share the small apartment, as the father works at the airport and the children go to public school. The Sakilah family lived in a refugee camp in Guinea before the International Rescue Committee brought them to Phoenix, and COAR stepped in to help.
What began as a student organization at Arizona State University became COAR, a rising nonprofit organization meant for students and those who need them. The organization’s mission is to support and befriend recently resettled refugees. COAR recruits and trains volunteers and mentors, while enhancing awareness of the struggles of the day-to-day for most refugees in this country.
Arizona State Refugee Coordinator Charles Shipman says there were 2,167 projected refugees to arrive in Phoenix and 3,004 new arrivals statewide this year. There are 2,517 projected refugees to arrive in Phoenix in 2009 and 3,442 refugees statewide.
COAR interacts directly with the lives of refugee families and refugee students through the Volunteer Anchor program and the Reaching Higher program.
The Beginning
A Cambodian refugee and former ASU student, Sambo Dul, founded the club in 2002. The club was originally called Refugee Resettlement Volunteers, and was classified a nonprofit organization in 2005.
Cara Steiner Kiggins, executive director emeritus on the Advisory Committee for COAR as well as a founding member for the organization, helped to lead COAR through the stages from student group to nonprofit organization.
Kiggins got her start with COAR volunteering with an 11-member Somali Bantu family living in Phoenix.
“Volunteering with a family as a Volunteer Anchor, for me, was an amazing opportunity to learn about and from a family with a background far different from my own,” Kiggins says in an e-mail. “I worked with a great family, whom I’m still in contact with.”
Kiggins is currently studying Forced Migration and Refugee Studies in Cairo for the year. She lives there with her husband and other co-founding member for COAR, Justin Kiggins.
Kiggins says her COAR family had spent 13 years in a Kenyan refugee camp after fleeing Somalia.
“Arriving in Phoenix after those years in a refugee camp meant quite a bit of adjustment for them,” she says. “Originally, I went into the volunteer experience with the expectation that I would be offering help to the family.”
Kiggins says she expected to help them with English, show them some sites of interest around Arizona, and spend time helping the kids with homework.
“Howeve, what I didn’t expect was the two-way mutually beneficial relationship we developed with the family,” she says.
Kiggins says she learned so much from the family she worked with, mostly about the strength and resilience of refugees, as well as about the perspectives of Somali Bantu living in Arizona.
She and her partner visited the family once a week for a total of three to five hours. Kiggins says they worked on anything the family needed that week from questions they had, practicing English, shopping for groceries, going through the mail, deciphering bills and helping the kids with homework.
Kiggins says in the early days, COAR was a close-knit, small group of people who intensely cared about refugees living in Arizona. The entire process and experience was new, and none of the volunteers really knew exactly what they were doing. They began attending training sessions on nonprofit organization management and worked closely with other refugee resettlement agencies in Phoenix.
“We were applying for seed funding, and it was through the Edson Student Entrepreneur Initiative that we first received seed funding to grow COAR from a student club to a nonprofit organization,” Kiggins says. “Now, COAR has grown to amazing proportions, and we are all very proud of that fact.”
Kelli Donley, Executive Director for COAR, says she is always trying to find ways to help people with the abilities she has.
Donley says she feels as though her job at COAR is to “not only work with newly arrived refugee families who need as much assistance as possible to get up on their feet here, but to also [to help the community realize] why it’s important for us to come to together to surround people like this in making life a little bit more balanced.”
Volunteer Anchor Program
Political science senior Laura Saville is one of the two volunteers in the Volunteer Anchor Program for the Sakilah family. This is her first volunteer family.
She says her responsibility to the family is to just be a friend.
“They really don’t have someone they can call for little things,” Saville says. “Like where’s the grocery store? How do I find out about events going on in the area?”
Saville is placed with the Sakilah family until May 2009, but she says she wants to keep in touch with them after her volunteer work is over.
“I really want to see them be happy here,” she says. “I know they have been through a lot and I want them to be comfortable.”
The Volunteer Anchor Program was the first program COAR started. COAR works with three different resettlement agencies: Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services and the International Rescue Committee. The resettlement agencies contact COAR and suggest what families need extra help. COAR pairs two volunteers with the suggested refugee families. They currently assist 25 families and 50 volunteers.
Kyrsten Sinema is the President of the Board of Directors for COAR. She says the organization intends to ensure that refugees are able to pursue full and rich lives here in Maricopa country.
“The resettlement agencies are the first step, but they only have the capacity to provide financial assistance, housing and register children in school,” Sinema says.
Sinema says the next step is where COAR comes in to help refugees acclimate and find their place in the new community.
“COAR is not just a job for me,” Sinema says. “It is something I do because I care deeply about refugees, and I care about students. I think this is a great opportunity for students and refugees to come together.”
Reaching Higher
History, political science, and Spanish senior Wendy Zupac is the programs director for COAR, and has been since 2007. She is also the president of COAR ASU club, although the group doesn’t necessarily meet on campus, but at the COAR office in Tempe. This is her third year working with the organization. She began as a mentor her sophomore year in college with the Reaching Higher Program.
“Every year COAR takes a group of 20 refugee high school students…then we recruit mentors from ASU, and put on six different college prep workshops throughout the year,” Zupac says.
There are three workshops a semester held at ASU’s West Campus. The first workshop acts as an introduction with an art activity.
“We have them paint a picture that represents what they think home is and what they think of the United States,” Zupac says. “It just explores their background a little bit.”
The next meeting jumps into college preparatory work. Mentors and college bound refugees work on four year plans, professionalism and their application for the Reaching Higher scholarship. Those who have participated in the program can apply for a $2,000 scholarship.
Zupac says she can think of a specific time when she realized her work with the program was affecting future students.
“At the end of the year we asked the refugee students to write out just a brief a paragraph talking about what they learned from the program and what their goals were,” she says.
Zupac says the activity was optional so she was worried none of the students would want to talk because of shyness.
“But almost all of them came up and started talking about what they learned, and what their goals were, and how college would help them achieve those goals Zupac says. “It was pretty inspiring.”
She says one doesn’t realize the impact they are making, “until you actually see someone talking about how important college is to them or how they enrolled in college for the next year.”
Zupac says most of the volunteers in the COAR Reaching Higher program are ASU students. Several community members also volunteer.
“Every year that I do this I’m so impressed by the amount of work either volunteers or interns put into this,” Zupac says. “We have over 70 volunteers and they put so much effort into it.”
Videlinata Istina Krishna, 25, is a refugee from the Republic of Congo. She first arrived in Phoenix in 2004 after spending four years in Cote d’Ivoire and is now a junior majoring in philosophy at ASU.
Krishna participated in the Reaching Higher program as a refugee and since August 2008 is mentor coordinator for the same program. Krishna says Reaching Higher played a role in helping her find her way to ASU.
“They give you a mentor and the mentor works with you and tells you what would be the best way to apply and finance your education,” Krishna says. “I can still call her and ask her questions when something is confusing.”
Krishna says the workshops help, but really it’s the mentors.
As a mentor coordinator, Krishna says she monitors the relationships between mentors and students, and assists them with paperwork and communications. Krishna says she became a mentor coordinator after another COAR member suggested she apply.
“I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to apply to help out because I know it helped me a lot,” she says. “It’s always good to help — it’s good to help people out when you have an idea of what they’ve been through.”
*The name of the apartment complex has been changed to protect the identity of the family.
Reach the reporter at lauren.cusimano@asu.edu.
