Festival Fellow Spotlight: Olivia Issa

Tell us about your big idea!

I aspire to mobilize higher education institutions in every state in the U.S. to become hubs for refugee welcome.

I envision a world in which any young person who steps foot on a college campus learns the tools to champion refugee inclusion, where refugee-background students are empowered to take ownership of their futures, and institutions outside traditional refugee resettlement providers, like colleges and universities, help share the responsibility for mitigating the global refugee crisis.

Why harness college campuses — what makes them so valuable in supporting refugee-background students and families?

With nearly 4,000 higher education institutions across the U.S., we have the potential for just about every community in the country to embrace refugees by leveraging this network. We are not asking for communities to start from scratch: most campuses have on-campus housing, dining plans, health facilities, career centers, experience working with international populations, and an informed and capable volunteer base. We are simply equipping everyday Americans with tools to leverage the resources at their disposal to support newcomers in their communities.

This looks like: 1) campus communities being informed on what displacement is and how to support refugee-background peers; 2) campuses committing to providing refugee-support services like English as a Second Language (ESL) classes, career services, employment, and even housing and scholarships for refugees; and 3) students, faculty, and staff championing refugee inclusion in every space they enter. I am a firm believer that a champion once is a champion for life. If we can give young people the tools to advocate for their refugee-background peers during college, they will find ways to continue that kind of advocacy for the rest of their lives, no matter their career paths. It is those efforts that will drive the kind of sustained, structural change needed to shift us to a more equitable society.

I work for the National Association of System Heads (NASH), a higher education organization coordinating college and university systems to make system-level change. The NASH network includes 400+ higher education institutions coordinated by 50+ systems nationally. My job in the Refugee Resettlement Initiative is to work with every level of actors in those systems — from system heads, to presidents and chancellors, to faculty, staff, and students — to best include refugees in their campuses. Our model sees systems as the key to scaling refugee-inclusion initiatives quickly and efficiently; by working with a system like the State University of New York (SUNY), for example, we can communicate with 64 campuses about launching programs, rather than just one campus at a time. With such a wide-reaching network, we are able to coordinate statewide actors and even state governments towards this cause.

How did you come to this work?

I grew up hearing stories of my relatives’ displacement from the Middle East and North Africa. When I was 15 years old, I visited family in Lebanon and saw firsthand the conditions of Syrian refugees living in makeshift camps and strewn across the tiny country. I distinctly remember my grandmother — who had herself been displaced and came to the U.S. on a university scholarship — saying about Syrian refugees, “Olivia, those are our people. We can’t turn our backs to them.”

That fall, I started mentoring resettled refugee girls in my hometown of Chicago, and started a club in my high school to talk about issues of global displacement. In 2016, I realized that while Chicago has great services for refugees on the Northside of the city, there were few where I lived on the Southside, despite the sizable refugee population. I got together with neighbors and friends and helped found a nonprofit, Hyde Park Refugee Project, to serve refugees on the Southside. In 2017, I was helping furnish homes for arriving refugees in my neighborhood. We had an apartment all set up for a large family when we got the news of Trump’s Travel Ban. The family from Syria was barred from entering the country. That’s when I knew that no matter how hard I worked with my community and nonprofits, I had to understand policy in order for my efforts to succeed. It was in college that I found the perfect marriage of the locally-informed, grassroots work I love and the institutional, state, and federal policy I now care about: refugee access to higher education.

Can you share some of your favorite success stories? What projects are you most excited about?

We have seen town-and-gown communities come together to support these kinds of programs, such as in Washington State, where Washington State University-Pullman housed a refugee family in on-campus housing and engaged volunteers from both on- and off-campus to help them acclimate to the new environment. We have also seen nonpartisan support for these initiatives, such as in Kentucky, where state legislators from both sides of the aisle came together to pass a $10M appropriation of state funds and create a “Humanitarian Assistance Scholarship” to educate refugee-background students in the state. We are currently working with the Rhode Island Governor’s Office and the Rhode Island Office of the Postsecondary Commissioner to expand their highly successful workforce on-ramping program, “RI Reconnect,” to refugees and immigrants in the state. And in Oklahoma, we have seen professors remark that, in engaging with refugee populations housed on campus, their students are opening their minds to people unlike themselves.

My favorite part of this job, though, is supporting student leaders in their efforts to build more inclusive campuses. I coordinate our national network of student leaders, connecting them to speaking opportunities, events to promote their work, and most recently, opening our Catalyst Fund to award to innovative projects led by students.

This new form of civic engagement and campus diversity open up a world of opportunity for a new flow of ideas and perspectives in campus conversations that will undoubtedly shape the next generation of leaders to be more accepting of one another, more understanding of different experiences of the concept of “home,” and a sense of responsibility for sharing the world’s crises.

The views and opinions of the author are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Aspen Institute.