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The Rural Renewal through Resettlement project is pleased to present the findings from a year of intensive, community-based research and collaboration on the experiences of refugees placed into rural towns in Southern Vermont. This initiative, funded by the Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships, has brought together four main partners – the University of Vermont (UVM), the Ethiopian Community Development Council (ECDC), the Brattleboro Development Credit Corporation (BDCC), and the School for International Training/World Learning (SIT/WL) – to develop a unique internship and research model. Over the course of the last year, a group of advanced undergraduate students learned and worked in a “hands-on” laboratory on rural experiences with two resettlement experts—Dr. Pablo Bose (UVM) and Dr. Thomas Huddleston (ECDC).
Working in two phases beginning in May 2024, students combined summer service-learning internships in Brattleboro and Bennington with a yearlong community-based, student-staffed research project. This initiative emerged out of productive conversations amongst the partners regarding the challenges that their region faces. Southern Vermont, mirroring trends in many rural regions, grapples with an aging population and a significant labor shortage, as well as issues with housing, employment, transportation and economic development. Each of the partners brought their own particular questions to the project:
ECDC asked what opportunities and challenges might exist for the resettlement of refugees in rural areas?
SIT/WL asked what the viability might be in using campus dorms as transitional housing for refugees?
BDCC asked what potential there might be for using resettlement as a driver for regional economic development?
UVM asked how effective is a model that combines frontline internship placements with applied research?
Through interviews, surveys, site visits and a review of administrative data, our team was able to answer each of these questions systematically and thoroughly. We found that the experience of refugees resettled in Southern Vermont was by and large positive, both from their own perspective and that of the volunteers and agency staff who supported them. At the same time, there were challenges that were clear, especially in transportation and access to culturally significant resources, as well as a mismatch between education and employment opportunities.
This community-based, student-led research project thus was able to demonstrates that refugee resettlement can work in rural small-towns as well as–if not better than–in urban areas, but only if the community can bring together all four key factors of rural refugee resilience: 1) small-town belonging, 2) local volunteers/networks, 3) refugee community-building and 4) community-based services.
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