UVM Offers Free Summer Housing for Refugee Families

"We're welcoming our new neighbors," said Susan Comerford, associate dean for academic affairs and research in the College of Education and Social Services, as the university opens vacant summer residences to families from Iraq, Myanmar, and, soon, beyond. UVM already has well-established partnerships with the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program (VRRP), including a year-long series of staff seminars given by the social work faculty, but this new step presents immediate, direct aid to families whose lives have been upended.

With no housing sources of its own, VRRP relies on the same means of finding affordable living space as other Vermonters. "Because the current rental market is so competitive," said the nonprofit's director Judy Scott in an email, "having short-term housing available to a few newly-arrived families will make it possible for VRRP to find better long-term housing situations for these families. (Our) partnership with UVM demonstrates the university's commitment to being an active contributor to the success of refugees in Vermont."

As Comerford sees it, the relationship is mutually beneficial. "It benefits our faculty and our staff and our student body; it improves the diversity and richness of our campus culture," she said. "There's something more intimate about having a family in our midst and I think that intimacy helps us to grow and deepen our compassion and also I think for refugee families to have deeper, richer experiences with Americans. It's so difficult for them in their lives because they are so busy trying to survive that oftentimes they don't make American friends and I think those friendships sustain them across time."

In just a week or so that has already proven true. The two refugee families who have moved into the Apartments and Family Housing facility for nontraditional students have joined a community that already included representatives from 25 different countries. According to Sharon Pitterson-Ogaldez, assistant director for this section of residential life, the daughter of an Indian couple, about 8 years old and lacking playmates of her own age, has made fast friends, playing and riding bikes with the girl from Iraq who moved in with her mother last week. The young Iraqi speaks a little English and the girls are said to be "very talkative." She and her mother are waiting and hoping for the older sister to get papers to leave Iraq and join them.

Through translators, the Iraqi mother has expressed profuse thanks to Pitterson-Ogaldez and her staff for such a nice place and the dad from Myanmar, watching the sense of freedom his three children feel, has a face that beams, she says.