Christopher Coen
Melissa Sogard
nancylee1
A notice in Knoxvillebiz.com announces that Bridge Refugee Services Inc. is getting a new director:
Jennifer Ward Cornwell has been promoted to executive director of Bridge Refugee Services Inc. here
Who is this Jennifer Ward Cornwell? I looked her up and couldn’t find much of anything. Then I found a Facebook page with her name, which indicates that she just graduated from Furman University in 2007, and only just got a graduate degree this year. How is it possible that someone just out of school could be qualified to be the executive director of a refugee resettlement agency? (Although we hope she’s highly qualified and we wish her the best of luck, especially for the refugees’ sake.)
I suppose I should not be surprised by this at all in a field that also regularly employs people as caseworkers who have no experience working with refugees, and who often do not have masters degrees in social work. In fact you’re lucky as a refugee if your case worker even has a Bachelor’s degree in social work. But even in that case most of these people do not have a clue how to network with businesses to help refugees find jobs.
The other thing that resettlement agencies do is hire almost anyone who arrived here as a refugee themselves, and maybe has a college degree or worked for an NGO before they arrived in the US. But having been a refugee in no way automatically qualifies someone as a good case worker. I suspect that resettlement agencies hire refugees mainly for their foreign language abilities. Yet those skills often don’t help for long. Bosnian and other refugees from former-Yugoslavian republics are found all over the refugee resettlement field working as caseworkers and in other positions, and have language skills that are now fairly useless for the new set of refugees arriving these days. Although resettlement agencies are quick to tout the former-refugee experience of their caseworkers I think we should always ask, “but is this person a good case worker?”
Getting back to Bridge Refugee Services Inc., I just realized that we have a US Department of State inspection report for the agency from 2006. Bridge’s services leave a bit to be desired. Of all the refugees in the four families that the inspectors visited only one refugee was working. A Sudanese refugee family had arrived six months earlier yet the father was still unemployed even though he spoke good English. Refugees had to live in transitional housing for weeks – e.g. in a motel, a shelter, and in a host family’s home – before Bridge transferred them to permanent housing (this is a violation of basic requirements). Bridge also did not give ready-to-eat meals to all refugees upon arrival, as required. Files were often disorganized, incomplete or contained inappropriate documents. Caseworkers also did not know that refugees do not need social security cards to get a job, so the refugees were left to wait for months until social security cards arrived. I’m always struck with how we keep going year after year with the same basic mistakes being made over and over.
Bridge Refugee Services Inc. has had a several publicized problems this year — problems that the State Department inspectors obviously did not detect. See our previous coverage here, here and here.
