Switchboard Blog
Switchboard’s blog posts offer a wide range of insights on the newcomer experience, including practical tips for navigating the resettlement process, resource lists tailored to community needs, case studies about relevant programs, engaging stories of successful integration, and more.
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2025 Changes to the Naturalization Civics Test: What Service Providers Need to Know
On September 18, 2025, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) published a Federal Register Notice announcing implementation of the 2025 Naturalization Civics Test. Starting on October 20, 2025, the test will consist of 20 questions chosen from a pool of 128 rather than 10 questions from a pool of 100 in the 2008 version. Passing…
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If you’ve worked in employment services for a while, you know that the holidays (late November through early January) are often the slowest hiring months of the year. If there is one time of year when you feel like you’re terrible at your job, it’s probably during the so-called “most wonderful time of the year!”…
- Daniel Wilkinson
This blog post is part of a series on engaging with your local community to build support for refugee resettlement. See our previous posts on Sharing Refugee Stories to Build Community Support and Using Data to Tell Program Stories…Without Putting Your Audience to Sleep. Wondering whether your program data has potential for community engagement? Unsure…
- Switchboard
This blog post is part of a series on engaging with your local community to build support for refugee resettlement. See our previous post on Sharing Refugee Stories to Build Community Support and stay tuned for a forthcoming post on How States and Other Refugee Service Providers are Using Infographics to Engage Communities. Many of…
- Meg Gibbon
This blog post accompanies a new toolkit developed by the Urban Institute as part of the Switchboard program: Data-Driven State Refugee Programs: Lessons from the field on managing, analyzing, and using data to improve refugee programs. What challenges do states face in tracking Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) program outcomes? States face a number of…
- Charles Shipman
This blog post accompanies a new toolkit developed by the Urban Institute as part of the Switchboard program: Data-Driven State Refugee Programs: Lessons from the field on managing, analyzing, and using data to improve refugee programs. The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) recently delivered a series of webinar trainings on its updated ORR-6 report, which…
- Jaime Costigan
This blog post was written by Jessica Shakesprere and Ian Hecker of the Urban Institute. It accompanies a new toolkit developed by the Urban Institute as part of the Switchboard program: Data-Driven State Refugee Programs: Lessons from the field on managing, analyzing, and using data to improve refugee programs. Many states that welcome refugees lack…
- Urban Institute