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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Switchboard’s Annual Survey of Refugee Service Providers (ASRSP): Early Insights and Next Steps

The U.S. refugee resettlement system is evolving rapidly. Shifting policies and new technologies are reshaping how services are delivered, often in ways that directly impact both refugees and the service providers who support them. Yet despite their central role, the voices of service providers are rarely captured systematically. Without their perspective, policymakers and program leaders…

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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…

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…

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…

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…

Connecting clients with jobs is essential to their self-sufficiency, but it’s not the only way to promote economic security and success. Economic mobility and long-term integration can be improved by establishing broader economic assets such as a credit score, home equity, checking/savings accounts, post-secondary education, retirement savings, and access to tax services. To learn more,…

Have you been thinking about strengthening your monitoring and evaluation (M&E) processes? It can be challenging to plan out who on your team will be involved in collecting, entering, quality-checking, analyzing, and reporting on your program data, not to mention using the data to make program decisions! M&E plans are intended to guide monitoring and…