Visit Refugee Resource Center

“My name is Valeene Bedford.” She said.

She continued said “The name of the organization is Refugee Resource Center and we started about five years ago 2014. We actually began in the living room of a refugee woman with her children.

we are totally a community, it does not matter race, religions, who matters, as long as refugees, any type of immigrants or silent seeker, we help them.

We asked them what is that you want to do when you were home before you want to be in a refugee camp or before something happened in your country and you had to come here. And we began to see lights just turned on in their eyes as they were recounting their dreams, remembering their dreams. So what we did was telling them we will help them as long as they would work and work hard, we will help them to recapture and realize their dreams because anything is possible here in America.”

She said “our initial goal was to help people to get the education they needed, a lot them came from the camps, they are totally illiterate. They do not have any ideas about alphabet or reading, even in their own languages, much less English and then to see that we had the resources they needed to begin that level, the education, that is our focus, our main focus.

They need a path back to their professions, which is kind of hard in America because they were told that their certifications, their diplomas, their degrees that we do not recognize here. So we began a program to help them translated and to get them evaluated and from that what we will do is work to get them back to their fields of their career, whatever it is.

We had a number of successful stories where people who are making $11 a hour in very basic job, the minimum wage job, where now able to grow three or five dollars a hour working in their field, simply because they took that test.

I think from our experience, the most help they need, the most important help they need by now is for us to change the model of providing services to them. They need people to understand their cultural differences and that they can be helped the same standards from who is from this country.”