The people who power refugee resettlement in the United States are deeply committed to their work, but what do their days actually look like, and how is the workforce holding up?
Switchboard’s Annual Survey of Refugee Service Providers (ASRSP) seeks to fill this gap in our collective knowledge about those who work to support newcomers in the U.S.
Today, we’re releasing two things you can start using right away:
- The full ASRSP Pilot Key Findings Report, which presents the complete results, methodology, and measure definitions in one place.
- A set of visual key insight briefs, each a short, two-page, plain-language summary of one topic, complete with the headline data, actionable insights, and links to relevant Switchboard resources. The briefs cover People and Organizations, Work Experiences, Direct Service, and Burnout.
The briefs are built to be shared. Whether you’re a supervisor starting a conversation with your team or a leader making the case for new supports, each one distills the findings into something you can act on.
To the providers who took the time to share their experiences with us in the pilot and follow-up interviews: thank you. Your insights are the foundation of this work, and they will help build a stronger, more sustainable sector for the years ahead.
What Is the ASRSP?
The ASRSP is the first nationwide survey of the U.S. refugee service workforce, built on a simple but often overlooked idea that knowing more about providers’ well-being, capacity, and stability means they can be better supported, and better-supported providers mean better outcomes for clients. Designed to complement ORR’s Annual Survey of Refugees (ASR), it captures the provider perspective and, fielded annually, will track how conditions shift over time.
The pilot was fielded in January 2025, with 346 providers from across the country sharing their experiences. Respondents spanned resettlement agencies, community-based organizations, and government offices across all U.S. regions surveyed. While the pilot’s primary goal was to test and refine the survey for future years, the results were insightful enough that we wanted to share them. One important note: the survey was distributed to Switchboard’s network of refugee service providers, so these findings should be understood in that context rather than as representative of the full workforce.
Even so, they reveal striking patterns, and the team at Switchboard has identified actionable insights, offering practical guidance and free, readily accessible Switchboard resources to support in turning the data insights into action within your work.
Key Insights the Pilot Revealed
The ASRSP covered a wide range of topics, from caseloads and compensation to burnout, mental health, and workplace safety. A few findings stood out.
This is a committed and rapidly evolving workforce. Providers bring a rich mix of lived experience and professional backgrounds to their work, and more than half had entered the sector within the last four years, making onboarding, training, and early-career support especially important.
Burnout is present, and stressors add up. Emotional exhaustion was the highest-scoring dimension of burnout, and it rose steadily as workplace stressors accumulated. Only 28% of providers reporting none of the four measured stressors exceeded the high emotional-exhaustion threshold, compared with 92% of those reporting all four. Burnout, in other words, is rarely driven by any single factor.
Supportive conditions make a measurable difference. Regular supervisor contact and career advancement opportunities were significantly associated with better well-being. Providers who met weekly with their supervisor, for example, were far more likely to feel fully supported than those who met less than monthly (73% versus 24%). These point to concrete, often low-cost steps organizations can take to improve providers’ work lives.
Safety is a central consideration for many providers. Nearly one in four respondents reported experiencing threats or incidents of violence at work in the previous 12 months. Those who did reported significantly higher burnout and were significantly more likely to consider leaving their jobs, underscoring the importance of organizations’ prioritization of workplace safety in support of staff well-being and retention.
Each of these themes, with practical guidance and Switchboard resources, is explored in its own key insight brief.
Why It Matters
What the data make clear is that structural conditions are strongly associated with provider well-being. That’s good news: targeted, practical investments—including stronger supervision, clearer career pathways, more stable compensation, and attention to workplace safety—can have a meaningful impact. The striking gap in well-being between providers with strong institutional support and those without it shows exactly where that investment is most likely to matter most.
The context and landscape facing providers has also shifted considerably since January 2025. These findings are best understood as a baseline snapshot, a foundation for comparison rather than a portrait of conditions today, which is precisely why an annual survey matters.
What’s Next: ASRSP Wave 1
Building on the pilot, Switchboard fielded the first full wave of the ASRSP from March 3 to April 3, 2026. Wave 1 expanded the survey with new role-specific modules, clarifying what work looks like for providers in different roles, and broadened its reach well beyond Switchboard’s listserv: more than 500 providers participated, with over half coming from outside Switchboard’s existing network.
Reports from Wave 1 will be released in the coming months, including a dedicated report on how technology is reshaping providers’ work, focusing on virtual services and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in refugee service delivery. We’re also developing an interactive data dashboard to let you explore findings from both the pilot and Wave 1 in more depth. Keep an eye on this space.
Explore the ASRSP Pilot Materials:
- Full Report: Key Findings from the ASRSP Pilot
- Key Insight Brief: People and Organizations
- Key Insight Brief: Work Experiences
- Key Insight Brief: Direct Service
- Key Insight Brief: Burnout
The IRC received competitive funding through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Grant #90RB0053. The project is 100% financed by federal funds. The contents of this document are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families.
