Policy and Practice | December 2022

Savvy local actors, such as local government representatives, caseworkers, and community organizations are often the unsung heroes in cobbling together stopgap remedies for supporting refugee families and needs not covered by existing programming.

groups with a wide array of support needs requires a holistic, systems based perspective. Though the media coverage on the recent humanitarian responses has quieted, national systems continue to work on providing supports in proportion to the needs of popula tions that have experienced events carrying extremely elevated trauma potential, as well as highly atypical and heterogeneous processing. This is a matter that has become exception ally acute for Afghan families, since many households are comprised of members with varying immigration status. 5 Furthermore, operations affecting refugee and immigrant groups require fine-grain operational coordination across a kaleidoscope of stakeholders and funding streams in order to avoid gaps, service duplica tion, and policy contradictions. Not least among these priorities is the coordination of economic and social supports falling outside of the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s framework of programs, 5 such as the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Conversations of this nature have catalyzed a wide range of new part nerships for engendering meaningful change by leveraging creativity and resources. Interdisciplinarity has proven vital to such efforts, and actors have been jointly addressing the incongruencies that families might otherwise have to navigate. One such example is the collabora tion between Loudoun and Fairfax counties of Virginia who, in collabora tion with Lutheran Social Services of the National Capital Area and Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Arlington,

in this domain, limited means for obtaining participant feedback, and limited actionable data have all rendered this a nebulous and fre quently impractical goal. Systems are now seeking to develop a shared understanding of these crises’ implica tions on various interconnected, yet frequently disjointed systems. In order to identify opportunities for modernization, some overarching narratives must be challenged. As fre quently occurs in other areas of human services, the current difficulties are not simply the consequence of high volume and limited funding, and as such, they cannot be rectified through finances alone. Rather, they reflect fragmented policies attempting to cover a wide breadth of needs. Prior to Operation Allies Welcome and Uniting for Ukraine, many U.S. systems were already struggling with equitable delivery of services to immi grant communities, and as such, were underequipped in terms of staffing and training to manage this groundswell of additional expectations. While the government has released consider able amounts of funding specifically dedicated to serving arrivals from Afghanistan and Ukraine, 4 and while a commendable array of activities has been undertaken by a variety of actors, many of the national, state, and local systems receiving this funding did not have enough time to plan how to best spend down resources in a coherent manner. This vast funding overlaid onto both infrastructural and disciplinary gaps has placed significant strain on administrators trying to effectively deploy resources while building in lasting resiliency. Scrambles of this sort, while inevitable under the presenting conditions, can ultimately be detrimental to progress since the provision of services to

The newest humanitarian responses have several novel dimensions with respect to their interactions with U.S. human services systems, including the volume of beneficiaries, the immediacy of the response, the disciplinary range required, and the variety of immigra tion pathways employed. While the 2015 collapse of Syria had already primed the nation for discourse around matters of capacity, the high number of Afghan and Ukrainian arrivals to the United States has catalyzed a reevalu ation of the refugee sector as a whole, requiring urgent bipartisan attention at every juncture. Compounding this urgency, the uptake of persons fleeing Ukraine, an unexpectedly rapid crescendo in the number of Cuban Haitian entrants, as well as a continuous stream of other border crossings into the United States, 3 have reinvigorated discus sions, with equitable service delivery to refugee and immigrant populations rising once more to the forefront of national discourse. Mapping Disjunctures Effectuating comprehensive reforms in serving refugee and immigrant families has been a long-held goal in human services, but in addition to political challenges, scarce funding

Amaya Alexandra Ramos , MSW, CPH, MA, is the Refugee

and Immigrant Social Services

Policy Associate at the American Public Human Services Association.

helped to establish the Virginia Community Capacity Initiative

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Policy&Practice December 2022