When I was a little girl, I arrived on Pan Am Airlines at the gateway of America, New York City. It was there that I first stepped on American soil before arriving at my long-term home in California. The truth is that I remember much of the trip only in photos as I experienced a lot of changes and hugs goodbye in the days leading up to the trip as a little girl not understanding the life journey I was beginning.

Leaving everything you know is challenging in many ways from learning a new language to finding a place to call home. During this past year displacement became a reality for many people around the world due to wars, conflict, environmental disasters, economic changes, and unpredictable events.

At the end of September 2023, an estimated 114 million people remained forcibly displaced by persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations, and events seriously disturbing public order. More than 1 in 73 people worldwide remained forcibly displaced. Most people who are forced to flee never cross an international border, with just 10 countries accounting for more than three-quarters of all people displaced within their own country. Similarly, over 87 percent of all refugees under UNHCR’s mandate and other people in need of international protection originated from just 10 countries.

International Rescue Committee Mission

The mission of the International Rescue Committee is to help people whose lives and livelihoods are shattered by conflict and disaster to survive, recover, and gain control over the future.

Who is a Refugee?

“Generally, someone who has been forced to leave their country due to persecution or violence and is unable or unwilling to return to their country due to a well-founded fear of persecution. That persecution is based on five categories, race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. It's not someone who leaves their country for economic opportunity, that person who may be able to go back to their country. A refugee is someone who is not able to go back, they will be persecuted, maybe their ethnic group, their religious group, or they were politically active. And in that case, they get a special designation by the United Nations that they're a person of international concern and they are under special protection.”

Women As Displaced People

“Women are a population that is of special concern to the IRC, not only here in San Diego, but across the nation and internationally. I think by nature in most of our societies, women often have responsibilities for children. When there's a displacement, they may be with their children and have to care for them and try and protect them. Women can be extra vulnerable to crime. Often when they're on their journey, they can be exposed to things that they would never be exposed to if they're on their own.

Men also obviously have responsibilities for children, but in some of the countries where we work, there may have been war and families get separated for a variety of reasons, and women are on their own and making their way when they come to the United States and become refugees.

We have also noticed that for a lot of our populations of women aren't maybe finding employment at the same rate as men, and they may need some extra help to become employed or to start a business. We've developed some programs to make sure we're including women and designing programs for women to be able to be successful here. In some of the countries where our clients come from, the women may not have worked outside of the home or may have had less education.

We pay attention to that and make sure we're providing services that are accessible to women as well as men. In San Diego there’s a women's resilience center where we provide a lot of support both for economic empowerment reasons, but also social and psychological support for women particularly.”

I think that San Diego, especially locally, has been making pretty significant advances in embracing and promoting gender equity as an organizational commitment. So just recently over the past year, we completed an 11 month gender analysis conducting focus group discussions with some of our men and women clients to better understand the barriers that they face to even access programming and services so we can make those improvements.
Some of the major themes that our women and male clients face came about through that analysis.
1. Women have most of the home-based responsibilities, which can impact their ability to access services and obtain stability. A significant amount of our women clients also experience barriers to achieving financial independence and stability for the reasons that Sharon just articulated and often face a dependence on their male counterparts for mobility.
2. We discovered that the men in these families sometimes experience the brunt of household stress when they're often trying to obtain an income to sustain their families as well as continue to send money abroad.
3. When they come to the United States, it's a very different cultural dynamics that often impact and increase the barriers that they face when they get here.
(Bennett Donine IRC's Development Manager in San Diego)

Refugee Process

“It's probably good to talk about the process of someone becoming a refugee to the United States, and this is someone who comes through the refugee channel. I already shared the definition earlier with someone who has to demonstrate that they're not able to go back to their own country and they're based on certain persecution. The United States actually goes and finds people who are refugees and interviews them overseas. It's done through the Department of Homeland Security to identify refugees and accepts people and gives them refugee status to come to the United States. So, this is not an instantaneous process. It can take many years.

Let's say there's a war in a country and people flee that situation whether maybe it was their region, their ethnicity, their religion, or something that caused a certain group of people to leave and go to a neighboring country.

Now they've left their country, they're outside of their own border and they don't feel they can go back because of one of the reasons, race, religion, nationality, etcetera. People may stay for some time in that situation. It could be in a refugee camp, or it could be in an urban area where they're living, but they may not have full status in that country. They may have a very limited status in that country. I'll say this is not always in every case, but people are hoping to go back. They think, like you mentioned, the war in Ukraine has gone on longer than we thought. Sometimes when these wars start or internal conflicts, most wars are civil war, so they're within a country, not a different country. People are hoping that they will be able to go back home.

When they end up in a refugee camp, it's thought by everybody that it might be short term and maybe this will last a few weeks, maybe a few months, and then we can go back. That's the initial plan that people would be able to go back. Unfortunately, a lot of wars are protracted. They go on for many, many, many years and people end up in that kind of indeterminate status for a long time and they're not able to fully live their lives. They have their kids, they're growing up in a refugee camp or in a urban area where they don't have all the full rights and status of that country. At some point the United States government might say, I think we can look at refugees from this area. It doesn't look like they have good prospects for going back to the country.

We can look and see which people who are deserving of extra protection in the United States, and they will interview people, confirm that they meet the definition of a refugee, they go through a series of background checks, and then they organize for them to come to the United States. This is called third country resettlement. They've left the country they grew up in or they were living in, they lived in a second country and now they're coming to the United States as a third country. When they come here as a refugee, it's considered to be a permanent resettlement that they will be able to, if they want to live the rest of their lives here, they're eligible to work from the first day they arrive and they can stay. After five years, they can apply to become a US citizen and they can live their lives in the United States.

So that process is not quick as you can imagine. It can be bureaucratic and a very small percentage of the over 114 million displaced people are selected. The US this year expects to admit about 125,000 refugees which is just a drop in the bucket. But for those people, it's an amazing opportunity, but that process is long. So even people from Ukraine coming to the United States from Ukraine since the war started are not coming with refugee status. They're coming with a different status because the refugee program takes much longer.”

About the International Rescue Committee San Diego

Since the International Rescue Committee (IRC) was first founded at the request of Albert Einstein in 1933, the global team of more than 17,000 staff has helped people upended by conflict and crisis to survive, recover, and regain control of their lives. Today IRC works in more than 50 countries and over 25 U.S. and European cities, from conflict-affected countries like Yemen to resettlement communities like Boise, Idaho.

The organization focuses on support in five areas: ensuring safety from harm, improving health, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring people have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. All IRC programming addresses the unique needs of women and girls (who represent the majority of those displaced)—and the barriers to progress everywhere we work.

Sharon Kennedy

Sharon Kennedy is the Executive Director of the International Rescue Committee in San Diego and has been in the development space for over twenty years, Ms. Kennedy understands the complexities of getting funding to the right resources and people facing a crisis. Starting her career as a young woman by joining the Peace Corps and working in Thailand set her on the trajectory of working to change lives. As a professional, she is known to be good at managing chaos, crisis and working for the best outcomes within a diverse workspace and community.

Bennett Donine

Bennett Donine is IRC's Development Manager in San Diego. Bennett has supported the San Diego office for over 3 years and manages all aspects of local resource development, including grants, fundraising, contributions in kind, and community engagement to sustain programming and resources for immigrant and refugee families IRC serves. Before starting at the IRC, Bennett had a background working and researching overseas in Ecuador, Cuba, Kenya, and Japan and holds a master's in international affairs and a bachelor's degree in global, environmental, and Hispanic studies from The New School in New York City. The mission and history of the IRC align deeply with her values, ancestry, and commitment to human rights advocacy.

Ways to Help

IRC Families Wish Lists for Direct Impact

Donate to IRC San Diego

IRC San Diego Open Volunteer Opportunities (always updated!)

About The Author

Annmarie Hylton, Head Marketing Strategist and Content Developer at Project Good Work, a boutique marketing group focused on helping individuals who want to launch social impact projects, charities, and change-making initiatives. The marketing group works to develop branding, marketing strategy, and content to connect clients with the people who believe what they believe so that their project and business can thrive.

If you have a passion for an unserved community, a social justice problem, or want to change minds, contact Project Good Work at ProjectGood.Work to start your project of change today.