Refugees Are an Asset, Not a Burden with Sasha Chanoff

Featuring Sasha Chanoff, Founder and CEO of RefugePoint

Speaker 1: [00:00:01] We can't fix the world alone. But collaborating isn't easy. And systems are allergic to change. So how do we do it without losing our damn minds? [00:00:11][9.5]

Speaker 2: [00:00:12] That is what we're here to find out. [00:00:13][1.4]

Speaker 1: [00:00:15] I'm Jeff Walker. [00:00:15][0.4]

Speaker 2: [00:00:16] I'm English Saul. Welcome to System Catalyst, the podcast that cracked the code for making the world a better place. Hey, Jeff. [00:00:29][12.9]

Speaker 1: [00:00:30] Hey. English. [00:00:30][0.1]

Speaker 2: [00:00:31] How's it going? [00:00:31][0.3]

Speaker 1: [00:00:32] Not so bad. So bad. Although I am listening to the news, and there's so much on the issue of refugees and immigrants and people coming across the border, and people worried about taking taking their jobs and everything else. And, you know, a lot of the people that I have dealt with that have immigrated into the country have been a huge assets, and they're great friends. And so converting, you know, immigrants and refugees into assets is not really talked about too much. It's more of who they are people are afraid of as opposed to potential. In the stats I keep hearing are kind of amazing. 75 million refugees now, and it's going to hundreds of millions in the next couple of years, from climate issues to war, etc.. So I've been thinking about that. [00:01:18][46.5]

Speaker 2: [00:01:19] Maybe like a couple years ago, maybe four, five years ago, I with my husband, we visited a refugee camp in Jordan. It's one of the largest in the world. And we got to meet, you know, quite a lot of refugees and see their schools and see their medical centers and those like the vastness of how large it was and how many people were there and just meeting them and, you know, hearing their stories and seeing their resilience and passion. I would love to live in a world where we could reimagine how to integrate these people into our communities versus try and kind of, you know, quote, fix the refugee problem. [00:02:01][41.9]

Speaker 1: [00:02:02] Well, you're in luck. We are interviewing Sasha China, founder and CEO of Refugee Point, and he's been a catalyst for change in this world for decades. Went from a direct service bringing refugees into countries and making them productive citizens, to coordinating the UN and Mercy Corps and IRC and many other organizations to all work together. So, let's listen to him and his ideas and what he's been bringing to the table. So maybe we could just start with you talking about, you know, you were born in Finland and then came into the United States with your family and kind of grew. But you're clearly got an affinity to working with immigrants and refugees and some others. So how did that happen? [00:02:53][50.3]

Speaker 3: [00:02:54] Yeah, I was born in Finland, but I grew up in the US and going back and forth, so I certainly grew up bicultural and bilingual with Finnish and English and my, my great grandparents on my dad's side came here as refugees 100 years ago, too. But it was actually when I started volunteering for the Jewish Vocational Service in Boston that. I had really quickly a very powerful experience. Somali and Bosnian refugees were coming in. I was supposed to help them find jobs. And when I first got to meet some of these people and they told me about their experiences, like fleeing their homes now, having their homes shattered, often separated from family members and losing so much. And they were here in the US through the US resettlement program, and they wanted to rebuild their lives. And I was struck really viscerally with this feeling that if I could play a small role in helping them to do that, it was the most important thing that I could do with my life. [00:03:54][60.8]

Speaker 1: [00:03:55] How old were you then? [00:03:56][0.6]

Speaker 3: [00:03:57] I was just graduated from college, so I was like 22 or 23. I was like, okay, I'm supposed to help people find jobs, but I actually see that people need a lot more than that. They need to feel a sense of belonging and home and family. And how do you do that when you don't speak the language and you're totally new to this place and you're dealing with coming from a situation of war. So I was like, I had a great boss woman named Judy Sachs. And I said to her, Judy. I want to organize a soccer tournament for refugees. And she's like, as long as you can still do your job and do that, that's fine. So I organize this big like refugee six and six soccer tournament. We had like Bosnian, Somali and Iraqi and Vietnamese and Russian, other teams of refugees who'd come here to the US. And there was some media attention around it. And it was cool because it connected with something that people could do really well and loved. And so you could see that they were really engaged with it, and it was like it was just this opportunity for people to express who they were at a time when they feel really dislocated and isolated. And so that was just, I guess, an example of like, as always, drawn to doing the things that weren't in my job description. [00:05:13][76.3]

Speaker 1: [00:05:16] Sasha went on a quest to help refugees not just survive, but also thrive. And it was while he was working at the International Organization for migration, or IOM, that the need for Refuge Point became clear. [00:05:28][12.0]

Speaker 3: [00:05:30] My boss at IOM called me into his office. His name was David, dirt thick, and he handed me a list with 112 names on it. And he said, Sasha, I want you to go into the Congo as part of a small evacuation team to evacuate these 112 Tutsis who are waiting in a safe haven outside of Kinshasa, the capital. And the US government had contracted IOM to initiate these evacuations because President Kabila at the time had said the people of the Tutsi tribe. This is in 1998, are the enemy and need to be hunted down and imprisoned and killed. And that led to attacks across the country. And I think perhaps out of guilt over not having acted during the Rwandan genocide, the US government decided it had to try to evacuate Tutsis and then bring them to the US through the resettlement program. So he asked me to go in and he said, listen, I'm sending my right hand person in with you. Her name is Shekhar. She's a senior operations officer. I knew her a little, and he said she knows how to do everything. So you can, like, follow her lead. But sometimes she tries to take additional people on these evacuation flights. And if she does, you have to stop her. We have permission to take these 112 people out. But if you try to take anybody else, the Congolese government will put their own people on your evacuation. They'll take yours off. You won't get them out. And whoever doesn't get out likely won't survive. So she. Can I go into the fly into the Congo and go to the safe haven. And the 112 people are there, and we register them and tell them that we're going to fly them out in a few days time. We had chartered a plane, and we're going to get armed guards and get everybody on busses and get them to the airport. And as we were trying to leave, a guy who was working in that safe haven said, do you have to go into the big tent over there? There was a large tent that could accommodate a lot of people and go see the new people that just came in here and I said, sorry, our flight is closed. We've already told everybody that we're not taking anybody else. But Sheikh, I said, I'm just going to go look. And she was walking into the tent and then I followed her into the tent. And I remember it was like. Very quiet in that tent, which was surprising because there was 32 widows and orphans in there who had been put into it, like the prison camp where many of their family members had lost their lives. And they looked very emaciated and traumatized. And the guy who had brought us in said, like, you have to take these people on your flight with you. If you don't, you can see for yourself, they're not going to make it out of here. Sheikh leaned over and and like said to someone, a little girl holding a doll. Oh, let me see your doll. And all of a sudden the dolls eyes opened and we realized that was it like a tiny infant didn't weigh more than 4 pounds and did not look like it would survive much longer? So shaken I left and went to the hotel where we were based, and we started arguing that night and she said, Sasha, we have to take these people out. And my boss, David, was like my hero and a mentor, and he had given me really explicit instructions. And I was like, Sheikha, I know I want to too, but we can't. There's no way we can risk everybody's lives. And she said, Sasha, we have to. And we argued about it all night. And she finally said to me, Sasha, are we or are we not humanitarians? This is what we're here to do. And she convinced me. So we called David and he got really upset. And he said, you can't do this. And we said, we're sorry, David. Like we saw these people face to face. We can't not do it. So he calmed down and he said, okay, this is a US government mission. So if you can get the US ambassador's approval, go ahead and try it. And Sheikh, I knew the US ambassador, so she got his approval and I the last morning we got everybody onto busses and we had armed guards. I ordered additional armed guards. So we had like four armed guards per bus. And we got everybody to the airport and, and we had our charter evacuation plane there. And we started getting off the bus and moving into the plane, and they stopped the 32 widows and orphans from getting off the bus. It's like, oh my God, have we like, did we make the wrong decision? Have we condemned everybody to death here? And Sheikh, I went over and started talking to the head immigration guy. I think she was saying something like, these are widows and orphans. And finally they'd let us get onto the plane, and we sped up down the runway and we took off. And I remember thinking as we lifted off the ground like, oh my God, people are going to be so psyched. I turned back and looked at everybody, and a lot of people were crying because they had family and friends who had been left behind, whom they didn't know if they were alive. But we finally got them all out and we went to Cameroon and in the refugee camp there. They stayed for a few months, and then they were interviewed for the US resettlement program and came to the US a few months after that. And that was like 23 years ago. And I'm still very close friends with a lot of those people. [00:10:32][302.1]

Speaker 1: [00:10:34] This experience taught Sasha that the systems designed to help refugees left so many behind. So he became determined to do something about it. [00:10:42][7.8]

Speaker 3: [00:10:44] It kind of opened my eyes to people who are off the radar, who are overlooked and forgotten. And it was like, you know, that Fedex logo that has an arrow in it, and the first time you see it, you can't unsee it. Every time you look at a Fedex logo, you see that arrow. But if you don't know, it's there, right? Right. That's kind of what happened with me. It was like. Everywhere I went, I was tuned into those people who are overlooked and forgotten. And I thought, I need to start an organization for those people. I also saw that the U.S. resettlement program, which I had worked in my entire career and that I knew was a life saving mechanism for people who often had no other opportunities to survive, was dramatically unutilized and even broken as a system. Every year, our president sets a ceiling of how many people can come to the US, and it's usually about 75,000 people, although this year it's 125,000 under the Biden administration. But every year tens of thousands of slots were going unused and they don't roll over. So between the year 2020 14, about 250,000 slots were going unused. And I thought this is like akin to criminal. How is it possible that people that need this so much and our tax dollars pay for it, and it's a program that's there is going underutilized? It's a pretty intensive thing to help people resettle. It's a long process and you need a lot of intensive work for it. And the UN is concerned with refugees globally. Today, there's over 114 million people who've been forcibly displaced. And when you're concerned with hundreds of thousands of people pouring over the border from, say, Sudan to Chad or from Somalia to Kenya, and you have to care for those people. Resettlement consideration for tens, hundreds, thousands is not as high up on the priority list. I felt that there was a need for an organization that could actually be focused entirely on this issue. So Refugee Point started with the idea to help identify refugees for resettlement, but more broadly to help build a broken system. [00:12:55][130.4]

Speaker 1: [00:12:59] Since it started two decades ago, Refuge Point has worked in 64 countries and helped resettle about 140,000 people. To achieve this, they developed a tool that really changed the game in the refugee space. It's called the Self-Reliance index. Basically, it combines several factors like employment, housing and education to measure refugees progress towards living independently. [00:13:22][23.4]

Speaker 3: [00:13:25] Today, there's over 114 million people who have fled their homes because of violence and war and persecution. Those who cross an international boundary and are considered refugees often don't go home for 20 years, sometimes 30 years, sometimes 40 years. It's crazy. It's crazy. I just met a guy from Kakuma camp and he said he's been there for 30 years. His mom carried him there as an infant. She died there 25 years later. All his siblings were born there. And now his three girls were born there. And you know what he wants more than anything else? Not to be in Kakuma camp anymore. So the idea that the humanitarian response system can support people with food and tents and basic aid until they go home, just doesn't match the reality of the world today. So when we started asking around who else is doing self-reliance? Worker? Who else is interested in this? Pretty much everyone we spoke to, all the organizations said this is critical. Like this is the future, but there are problems. Nobody funds it. There's not even a recognized definition for it. There is no measurement around how to do it. And all the funding in the humanitarian space is siloed. You World Food Program get money to give people food. You agency that applies for the funds are providing the health service to refugees. You other agency are getting providing the education services. But none of these actually look at how a family can progress from point A in a really vulnerable situation to point B doing better and actually feeling secure in their lives over the long term, which is what we started doing. So the first thing we heard from everybody was, well, we don't know how to measure this. So we said, well, why don't we create a measurement tool? And we assembled a group of about 30 organizations and academics and others, and with the support of the Ikea Foundation and Hilton Foundation and a lot of private donors, we created a measurement tool. It took a lot longer to build than we hoped, but it was like three years, and then we released it to the world, and then people started using it, and then we hired somebody to help train people. And along the way, we built this community of practice of organizations and individuals really interested in thinking about self-reliance. We thought, we are on to something here. I remember one leader in the humanitarian space said, if you can figure out how to measure self-reliance, that is the holy grail of humanitarian response. Everybody will want that. And now, a number of years later, we created, along with the Women's Refugee Commission, we co-created something called the refugee Self-Reliance initiative with the idea to transform humanitarian action away from emergency aid and toward what refugees themselves say they want, which is to stand on their own two feet and lead normal lives, even if they're stuck in the countries to which they fled. We're seeing that people can actually take this journey and succeed and support themselves and contribute to their communities and feel good about their lives, and feel a sense of hope and aspiration for the future. What we found now over the past few years of use is that over 50 organizations in 28 countries, reaching more than 2 million people are using the Self-Reliance index as a tool to measure the impact of their programing. In fact, the State Department, which is a close partner with us, recommended this tool in their NGO guidelines around livelihoods to the partners receiving their funding. Ikea Foundation is using it in their funding. Some of the biggest organizations in the world, like the International Rescue Committee, told us earlier this year that they're incorporating it into their over 40 country offices around the world as a measurement tool. Other leading organizations are using it, but importantly, many refugee led organizations are also using it. And we brought together a steering committee of refugee leaders and others to help us. So we've built this like multi-stakeholder approach to trying to transform humanitarian action. And what we're finding is that everybody is on the similar page of wanting to see refugees become self-reliant. [00:17:42][257.3]

Speaker 1: [00:17:46] A few things to point out here. First, Sasha discovered a crack in the system. Which was that so many refugees were living in camps for decades because they had no way out. In other words, he was proximate. Second. Once he did find that crack, he used every resource at his disposal, research data in partnerships to create a tool that could fix it. Third, he made that tool available to everyone in every organization so that it had the best chance to work across the system. There's 120 814 or so million now. And how many is there's going to be with climate change and everything else, creating climate refugees as well. And, all the conflicts that are now underway. Is that number going to double in ten years, or is there an estimate of what the problem is going to be, because it's could go get nothing but worse, right. [00:18:37][50.8]

Speaker 3: [00:18:38] Yeah, I mean, one, I think it's going to continue to be one of the headline issues of our time. Some estimates put that number by 2050 at hundreds of millions of people, or even a billion people forcibly displaced because of climate. But, Jeff, I think there's also there's another way to look at this. I mean, of course, that's so horrifically devastating that so many people are forced from their homes and need to figure out how to rebuild their lives. And right now, we're seeing the impact of that. It has serious political implications. Right. You're seeing the rise of extremism and xenophobia and isolationist tendencies of governments, and that's not going to help. That's just going to put more people in danger. And we see that that's actually not the solution either. If we can find ways to tap into people's intrinsic strengths and enable them to support themselves and the countries to which they fled, that is part of the solution. People don't want to be dependent on an erratic handout. That is demoralizing. It is oppressive, it is undignified, and yet it's the norm. People want to feel self agency and they need an opportunity to do that. There's already evidence the world Bank has it. Even the US has it here for refugees who've arrived here, that when people can contribute, they do significantly to their local communities and to the economies of their countries. There was a study in the US that showed that over ten years, refugees who've come here contributed $63 billion more to the economy than they took in services because of the work they were doing. But that can also happen in host countries. When I say host countries, I mean not the US, not the EU, but the countries that are hosting the vast majority of refugees Turkey, Pakistan, Uganda, Ethiopia, Jordan and many other countries. Bangladesh. If you provide opportunities for refugees to become self-reliant, they're going to be contributors. That changes their lives and the lives of those in their host communities. Refuge point started a program from Kenya for refugees there to Canada, where employers, particularly in the health care industry, cannot find employees nationally and with an aging population, need people to work. And so they have turned to refugees who are nurses and who have skilled help in health care to come to Canada, and many are arriving there. But the profound thing that we have seen is that people say when they talk to us about this program and then get an interview with an employer and then get hired, that this is the first time in their lives that they have been seen as a whole human being. It's the first time that people aren't saying, what's the horror that you went through? Tell us about the persecution you faced. And now what do you need here? But it's rather questions like what are your skills and experience? What background do you have that led you to health care? Why are you interested in that? So it takes a whole different orientation toward people. And that's what self-reliance does too. And what we ask in Nairobi. What do you want to do? What are you good at? What's your education? What's your background? People are business leaders. People have professions, and people want to utilize their skills. And when you enable them to do that, it's dignified. It enables people to feel like they're human beings who are seen for their worth, as opposed to seen for their victimhood. [00:22:09][211.5]

Speaker 1: [00:22:10] And their opportunities and potential. That makes more sense. [00:22:13][2.5]

Speaker 3: [00:22:15] Now I feel like I'm preaching. [00:22:16][1.1]

Speaker 1: [00:22:17] But you should say that's what your job is. You know, you, you wrote a good book From Crisis to calling with your dad, and you talk about eight different stories of people that kind of face these crucible issues. But you also talk about five principles. And I wanted to make sure you were able to talk about those principles to to the audience. [00:22:38][21.5]

Speaker 3: [00:22:39] Yeah. Thanks. I'm glad you asked that. I shared that story a little earlier, but yeah, there are five principles. You know, one is be prepared. That is, be prepared for moments in your life where there's a moral dilemma or a moral conflict. I think it's really easy to look down and just be focused on what you're doing and not look up and around. So the first principle is be prepared. The second one is open your eyes. That is. Be alive to the dilemmas around you. For me, and in the specific experience of the Congo operation. It was walking into that tent. My eyes were open to the plight of people who would have otherwise been left there. And the third principle is confront yourself. And again, for me, I put this in the experience of that Congo mission. But what I found is this is a kind of framework that I think works for others and others have experienced that confront yourself is make sure you have a chance to question what you should do. For me, the confronting yourself was actually arguing with Sheikha who said, we have to take these people. And I said, we can't. And we argued about that. And the fourth is no yourself. What are your deepest values telling you to do? What is your own personal experience and education and who you are uniquely telling you what the right thing to do here is. And the fifth one is to take courage. Because sometimes it's hard to make a decision when you don't know what the outcome will be. And again, my circumstances were unique. But people are often confronted with different kinds of issues where the right course of action might be the hard one to take. But if you really tune into who you are uniquely, you'll find maybe the right answer. I wish I had more guidance and counsel at that moment when I was in the Congo, but I didn't. Thankfully, Shaco was there because otherwise, you know, it might not have gone the way it did. And of course, I love what you're talking about in terms of systems entrepreneurship and how you catalyze systems change. Because personally, as I've seen, the evolution of Refuge Point moves more and more in that direction because we see that great, large, bold transformation does not happen with one person or one organization, or even a few, but many coming together under a North star of action to do something that is a common goal and concern for us all. I find that when you present yourself not as a leader who is interested in your own organization, but rather you want to support other organizations that are doing good work, and you show them that you want to support them by connecting them with funders, by providing other kinds of support. Then you're starting to build the kind of trust that I feel isn't really there to the degree that it needs to be there. Then I think you're on your way to building something important, but it really it takes making sure that you're elevating others. And why wouldn't you want to elevate others? You know, it's interesting, when I got my start in Boston as a job developer, I found that there were a number of organizations that were getting funding from the state to help refugees find jobs, and they weren't sharing information because we're all in competition with one another. And yet I found that I had like, jobs. I knew about that. The case load at Jewish Vocational Service of 500 refugees. Nobody had the experience for those jobs. So I started going to other organizations and sharing with other job developers. Hey, I have this job. Do you have anybody for that? And they said, yeah. And we created like this network sharing information. And lo and behold, more refugees got more jobs. And that was like our early lesson for me is like, if you are actually first and foremost for the people you're serving rather than for your organization, then you're actually going to do more to help the people that you're supposed to be serving. And if you can make sure that everybody sees that, that your orientation is around, like supporting the field and supporting them, then I think that is a key to building trust. [00:26:59][259.9]

Speaker 1: [00:27:00] That's awesome. And totally, totally agree that unmanaged ego has to be in place so that you're not thinking about yourself or your organization as much for that system level change. You're doing amazing things and your enthusiasm is infectious. So thank you. Thanks, and I appreciate you taking the time. [00:27:21][21.2]

Speaker 3: [00:27:22] I am, grateful to you and grateful for you opening up this space for all of us and for your friendship and mentorship. I love calling you. You know, I love calling you at times saying, Jeff, I got something I got to talk to you about. You always pick up the phone. You're always there to give me advice. I appreciate that greatly. [00:27:40][17.8]

Speaker 1: [00:27:52] That's it for today's show. Please don't forget to subscribe to System Catalyst so you don't miss out on the new episodes. Also, do us a huge favor by reading our podcast ID leaving us a review. Thank you so much for joining us, and we'll catch you all in the next episode. Before we go, I'd like to thank our producers at human Group media. We'd also like to thank our incredible network of partners who are supporting our mission the School Foundation, the Aspen Institute's Aspen Global Leadership Network, echoing Green Dark Foundation, Maverick Collective, Virgin Unite, she released their own Africa outreach project, Boldly Go Philanthropy scenarios for Global Nexus and New Profit. If you're interested in becoming a system catalyst, you'd like to learn more about our partners, please visit System catalyst.com. [00:27:52][0.0]

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