April 10, 2025
City of Refuge is rapidly building a plane in the air while it’s flying – fortunately, at every turn, we look around to see another perfect piece to the complicated puzzle (one that seems to get more complicated with time). The perfect pieces are really just what transpires when people give sacrificially of themselves to lift another up. Somehow the gift of self miraculously meets a need — both the tangible and intangible. A person’s experience, passion, education, personality, connections, wealth…. perfectly aligns with what an individual, family, or our organization needs. It’s a marvel to witness, a marvel to hear about.
Read below as Aaron Finkel, our Community Partner Coordinator, shares more about how these puzzle pieces are falling into place as we continue to build the Buddy Group “airplane”.
What Hasn’t Changed
I get asked a lot how things have changed at City of Refuge over the last few months. I always respond by talking about what hasn’t changed: Our community has continued stepping up again and again to support some of our most vulnerable neighbors. I want to share just a little of what I’ve seen lately as coordinator of our Buddy program.
I don’t want this to just be a list of specific things people have done. I think it is useful to see all of the direct ways that our volunteers have made impacts with their Refugee community, and I will share a few examples, but it doesn’t get at the heart of what they are doing. One of the things that becomes more and more clear to me as I work at City of Refuge is that refuge is a thing that is taken, and also a thing that is given. And that while City of Refuge is an organization, the city in” City of Refuge” is all of Columbia, who holds up our organization so that we can give that refuge together.
The Buddy Program
The buddy program is one of the ways we work together toward that here in Columbia. It’s unique in that every single partnership is founded on an individual relationship. While there are a lot of specific and impactful ways our volunteers help, really what they offer is themselves. Right now we have over 90 volunteers walking alongside refugee friends. This includes the newly formed “buddy groups” where several volunteers work together to offer broader support to some of our refugee friends and families with higher needs.
One of these groups met their family for the first time in early March. This family had been in the country for a little while, but had many difficulties with language, culture, driving, and challenging health circumstances. We brought a translator with us for this first meeting. It was clear in the beginning that everyone was a little nervous, but quickly human connections were made and everyone started enjoying getting to know each other. We learned each other’s backgrounds, discovered shared interests (soccer!), and talked about some of the things the family had been struggling with. Our volunteers shared what they were hoping to offer: Weekly one-on-one meetings with the mother in the family to work on English, help with rides to medical appointments, help studying the driving permit test, family outings to discover what Columbia has to offer, and more. An hour passed quickly and when we were getting ready to leave the father in the family said “It has been so hard here. We have been lonely and everything has been difficult. But now with friends things will be easier.”
The next weekend I heard the whole group had taken a trip with the family to Cosmo Park Playground. The children had never seen such a place! A month later, this group of volunteers has helped in so many ways already, but maybe most importantly the family knows they have friends from the community they can count on. Things will still be challenging for a long time, but they will not be walking alone.
Transformation in Motion
We had another family of seven arrive in the beginning of January. Like many, they had never driven a car, and had no English! I can’t imagine how disorienting things must have been. The first time I met them was in our office when someone from their community brought them in to see what help we could provide. They seemed very nervous and distressed. As I write this, tomorrow they will have been here three months. I see them in our offices twice a week. The parents and oldest of their children are in our development class right now learning to pass their food safety certification so they can join our cooking classes Thursday. They have been here all morning for English class. One of the seven volunteers in their buddy group brought them this morning, and another is coming to take them home when class ends. Tomorrow several are meeting at their house to help them practice what they learned. The kids are enrolled in their local school district, and their buddies helped coordinate their enrollment, and even picked one up from school when they were sick. There have been weekly meetings to work on English and American culture, but beyond any one thing they have learned from their volunteer buddies, I see this family beginning to feel much more at ease here in their new country. I know their American friends have played a vital role in this transformation.
We have five active buddy groups right now. One volunteer is helping a brilliant young woman from the DRC(Democratic Republic of the Congo) who had to leave before she finished high school and aspires to be a lawyer. Another has been helping someone with a little English be more comfortable in job interviews. Multiple volunteers have attended our English classes with their refugee friends so they could support what we are doing here at the office. One volunteer is bringing her old camera to her buddy who is interested in learning photography.
Our City (You) Meeting Needs
This is just a small representation of what some of our groups have done recently. I just walked downstairs and ran into a volunteer who I introduced to a buddy in February. She told me her friend is taking the permit test today (they had been studying together) and Thursday they are going together to the public library.
I could list dozens of ways our volunteers have been helpful to their refugee buddies in the last few months, and this is just from the small percentage of what’s going on in these relationships I happen to find out about. We started 2025 with around 60 volunteers in this program, and I had a goal of reaching 100 by the end of the year. We will be there by the end of this month. We saw a bigger need, and the people of our city of refuge have been quick to respond to it. As the needs of those we serve evolve, we will rely on our city to continue to meet them.
BECOME A MONTHLY GIVER. The federal grants that allowed us to scale up and support the growing need for our services are coming to an end. The reality that we face is a $50,000 monthly deficit. In March alone, we saw 80 members of our community either increase their monthly giving or sign-up to be new monthly donors. Would you please consider giving and joining us in continuing our mission of serving and empowering refugees in Columbia?
An update from Paul at MO-ORA, absorbing four resettlement positions, summer school at City Preschool AND amazing testimonies from our relational work at City of Refuge- we covered a lot at our Quarterly Catch Up. No worries if you weren’t able to attend, you can still get all the updates and information through our recording at the link below.
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