Diya Abdo

Diya Abdo is building a national movement of “resettlement campuses”—mobilizing colleges and universities to host refugee families on campus and provide a soft landing, stronger beginnings, and pathways to belonging—while recentering higher education as a durable civic actor.

When Pope Francis urged every parish to welcome a refugee family, Diya Abdo asked: why not every college campus? She founded Every Campus A Refuge (ECAR) in 2015 and has since helped colleges and universities provide a soft landing for refugees and embed resettlement into the institution's identity and practices. With ECAR, Diya breaks down the silos of the resettlement system in the US and transforms university campuses into humanitarian hubs of inclusion and dignity.

ECAR leverages the city‑like infrastructure of campuses—housing, dining, clinics, classrooms, student talent—to provide a soft landing and a realistic runway for refugee families, while giving students sustained, ethical engagement with displacement in their own community. Diya is dismantling the notion that resettlement is the exclusive domain of governments and nonprofits and reframes it as a civic, educational, and moral responsibility shared by students, faculty, staff, and the wider community. ECAR is shifting the refugee crisis narrative from charity to shared humanity, from institutional passivity to collective ownership.

Now active on more than two dozen campuses across 14 states, with more than 100 campuses in the pipeline, the ECAR model offers a resilient, replicable framework for refugee resettlement—one rooted in community, equity, and long-term capacity building. The innovation extends beyond resource provision. By embedding resettlement into academic structures through minors, certificates, and practicums, ECAR creates institutional permanence that survives political volatility. When the Trump administration eliminated the federal Welcome Corps funding in 2025, every single ECAR chapter continued operating, pivoting seamlessly to serve existing refugees, asylum seekers and others in need. The infrastructure, once activated, persists.

ECAR is expanding where resettlement happens by tapping into an expansive and diverse sector that is already resource-rich and already prepared to do this work: higher education. By activating the city-like nature of colleges and universities and mobilizing their human and material resources, the model can create as many resettlement hubs as there are colleges and universities – 4,000 in the US alone, and at least 25,000 in the world.

There are over 40 million refugees and an additional 8 million asylum seekers worldwide. This number has tripled in the last decade and shows no signs of slowing down with growing political strife and climate crises. Many who've been displaced spend decades of their lives languishing in refugee camps, with low access to opportunities. Of the limited pathways to regaining citizenship, resettlement is the most pragmatic and durable. However, less than one percent of refugees are resettled annually. Even in resource-rich countries like the US, despite running the largest resettlement program in the world, admissions have been well under 125,000 in recent years, with limited local capacity cited as the most common constraint.

When resettlement does happen, practices in the US continue to prioritize financial independence over economic, social, and cultural success as well as over refugees’ sense of belonging. The current system is inadequate, fragile, siloed, and puts undue pressure on concentrated areas of the United States and fails to catalyze the resources needed to provide quality support.

Refugees arrive in the United States already in debt for their flight costs, which they must repay to the government within five years. Each person receives a one-time payment of $1,275 and loses important reception and placement support after 90 days. This timeline forces people to accept the first job they are offered, without adequate time to learn English, understand their surroundings, or recover from the trauma of displacement. Parents accept wages below their skill level to meet basic needs. Eighteen-year-olds forgo education to support families. Without social security numbers, credit histories or rental references, refugees face significant housing challenges and end up spending most of their limited funds on deposits and rent for overcrowded, inadequate accommodations. Within a few short months of arrival, many refugees are overwhelmed, socially isolated, and already caught in the binds of poverty -- reliant on a welfare system that is threadbare and difficult to navigate, even for native English speakers.

Resettlement work in the US is carried out by 10 national agencies, which are highly dependent on local infrastructure to successfully integrate refugees. The local capacity needed does not exist everywhere in the US but is concentrated in specific locations where refugees have typically resettled and continue to resettle (i.e. “hubs”). Since 2002, more than half of all arriving refugees have been resettled in only 10 states. This “oversaturation” puts stress on local economies – limiting employment opportunities and raising housing costs – which can prompt a scarcity mindset and increase tensions between existing and new residents. These dynamics, mixed with minimal community involvement in resettlement, have resulted in limited public understanding of the issues – as well as rampant negative discourse around refugee populations.

The current system is also inherently unstable. While agencies rely on local partners to support successful resettlement, most funding is provided by federal programming and is determined by the number of refugees that a community welcomes. When the politicization of refugees leads administrations to dramatically cut or completely stop admitting refugees, the local infrastructures crumble and take years to build back up.

Meanwhile, there are thousands of locations in the US where housing and employment are available but haven’t activated due to a variety of factors, chief among them the lack of coordination – individuals or entities that can mobilize the resources available in effective ways to support refugees. Higher education—one of the most resourced local actors—has engaged with the refugee crisis in important ways (research, community service, and support for refugee scholars) but has rarely been mobilized as a site for resettlement and integration.

Through ECAR, Diya is reimagining the role of higher education in responding to the refugee crisis—and in serving communities more broadly—by activating the abundant resources that universities can bring to meet community needs.

ECAR replaces the current system's frantic scramble with what Diya calls "a soft landing." Refugees spend 4-8 months on campus with access to facilities and services such as dining, career services, and clinics as well as material goods (furniture, tech, clothing). This gives families time to stabilize, save their stipend, and make informed choices about work, education, and where to put down roots. They establish medical records at local clinics, pursue employment through career centers, and begin to build social networks. Children attend local schools while parents access English classes or workforce training. The timeline allows for integration rather than survival. Once families have stabilized and secured housing, the ECAR chapter supports their transition off campus – including raising the funds to cover their security deposit and first month’s rent.

In addition to material resources, resettlement campuses welcome new families into a generous, resourced network of professors, students, and volunteers. Mentored by professors and practitioners, students provide case management as well as long-term meaningful cultural, social, and emotional support. Strategic pairings match skills and needs: business majors help families navigate American financial systems; nursing and public health students assist with navigating healthcare; education majors tutor children; local volunteers help navigate the transportation system; and students and families dine together while practicing language skills. ECAR chapters build partnerships with myriad local service providers (beyond their partnerships with resettlement agencies) to help bridge the gaps for the families.

ECAR prepares participating campus and community members to provide hosted refugees with culturally responsive, strength-based, and trauma-informed support. ECAR follows the accompaniment model, always centering refugees’ agency, dignity, and choice. A key tenant of the program is that no asks are made of families while they are living on campus. Participation in any campus event or experience that is not directly related to supporting the family’s integration is entirely optional. Families are not there to serve the students’ learning; rather, the students learn deeply and experientially by walking alongside the families they welcome on campus.

ECAR chapters continue to support refugees after they transition out of campus housing with social check-ins and connections to resources. Participants become part of a larger community, and many stay engaged by supporting and welcoming new refugee families. Through Ṣawt, ECAR's oral history project, refugee families who've transitioned from campus to permanent housing share their experiences—both to give back and to guide others. The Ṣawt interviews yielded practical tip sheets for incoming refugees, host campuses, and researchers conducting similar projects. The ongoing relationships matter as much as the initial support; Diya sees ECAR not as a service provider but as a community builder, maintaining connections that strengthen both refugees and their new communities long after formal programming ends. A study conducted on the impact of the program found that refugees engaged in ECAR experience financial security, improved mental wellbeing, and a sense of belonging due to their participation in the program.

Diya has spent years developing an evidence-based, open-source model for building a local resettlement system that is both concrete and easily adaptable to the unique context of each university – she equips them with free training courses, an open-source manual, a set of best practices, seed funding, and a broader ecosystem to rely on. ECAR’s strategic approach begins with a local campus “champion”—a faculty member, student, staff member, coach, or administrator—who is socially conscious, rooted in their community, and eager to make a difference in the refugee crisis. Diya’s team equips champions to rally interest, effect change in leadership, and ultimately, secure institutional buy-in. This individualized approach enables Diya to understand the unique context of each institution and position ECAR as a vehicle to advance their strategic and/or educational goals (as well as solve for pain points). For example, ECAR provides students with powerful curricular and co-curricular opportunities that allow institutions to engage, recruit, and retain students as well as engage alumni. In working with the refugee families hosted by their campus, students experience a valuable international educational opportunity. At a moment when colleges and universities across the country are struggling with student enrollment and retention, ECAR globalizes the campus while also recruiting prospective students who are invested in community engagement and tangible benefits of higher education, such as access to new minors or concentrations, apprenticeships, internships, certificates, training, conferences, and partnerships that support student career development and discernment.

Once they have secured institutional buy-in, Diya and her team guide campuses through a multi-stage process to become a high-functioning refuge and robust resettlement ecosystem. The first step includes mapping out the local ecosystem of existing and potential partners and resources both on and off campus. This part of the process prompts a radical reframe of abundance.

ECAR embeds into academic structures to ensure sustainability. At Guilford College, Diya developed an ECAR minor in refugee resettlement. At Oklahoma State, it becomes a graduate practicum. At community colleges, ECAR is a workforce development certification. This institutionalization ensures continuity through leadership transitions, creates pipeline programs for future professionals, and transforms how universities understand and deliver on their mission. ECAR campuses report increased applications from mission-driven students, stronger alumni engagement, and measurable progress toward inclusion goals.

Resettlement campuses flip the traditional service-learning model where students are trained in “real-world” scenarios at the expense of overburdened community partners and organizations. With ECAR, students aren’t sent “out there” to learn about their responsibility as a citizen and their ability to effect change; rather, universities are bringing the community into campus space, thus reframing for whom and how campuses can and should be used. Under ECAR, the borders between university and city become permeable and the relationships reciprocal. Some ECAR chapters are completely run by student clubs that get funding from the school to continue their efforts to fill the gaps they identify in the families’ resettlement experience. In a study conducted by ECAR to evaluate its impact on students, Diya and her team found that ECAR fosters empathy—both among students and within the broader community—by immersing participants in lived experiences different from their own and showing them tangible ways to contribute and make a difference. Research tracking dozens of student participants found 78 percent shifted career trajectories toward humanitarian work. These future teachers, doctors, and policymakers carry firsthand understanding of displacement into their professional lives.

Established campus chapters continue to work closely with Diya’s core team and join a national Community of Practice made up of all ECAR chapters. Chapters provide three implementation reports each year. The ECAR team also hosts virtual monthly Community of Practice sessions and an annual in-person ECAR Gathering, where Chapters can connect, share, and learn from each other.

Since 2015, ECAR has hosted 347 refugee families—approximately 1,400 individuals—across 22 campuses (with over 100 more in the pipeline). Beyond individual transformation, these numbers represent systemic change. Each campus opens new geographic territory for resettlement. The 14 states with active chapters include seven that previously resettled fewer than 500 refugees annually. If ECAR reaches 200 campuses by 2030, it will triple the number of American communities capable of supporting refugee resettlement.

ECAR is expanding the landscape of resettlement across the country. The 22 official chapters are scattered across 14 states and range from urban coastal liberal arts colleges to rural small town conservative institutions. As campuses and communities continue to open up, this relieves the pressure on oversaturated resettlement hubs and removes the silos that have kept refugees from integrating into local communities. Diya activates colleges to create their own peer networks with the local community and resettlement agency partners. ECAR coordinators and volunteers act as cultural ambassadors for both the town and the refugee family. Distinct from the typical time-bound integration events like World Refugee Day, where there is no continued engagement that fosters learning and shared experiences, ECAR fosters sustained ethical contact with refugees, which slowly and steadily break down the fear and mistrust that fuels harmful narratives surrounding refugees and opens people to the reality that, when resources are catalyzed and communities are coordinated, there is more than enough to go around. At its core, ECAR is a role-maker, inviting individuals as well as institutions to envision and inhabit new roles in relation to the refugee crisis as well as broader questions of community need. Once the structures for resource activation are set within the durable anchor of higher education, ECAR spurs an ecosystem that grows outward in concentric circles over time, each chapter expanding its radius of impact and influence exponentially over the years.

The network's resilience proved itself when federal funding vanished in 2025. Every chapter continued operating, pivoting based on local needs—some to asylum seekers, others to unaccompanied minors, several to unhoused families. The University of San Francisco opened their chapter specifically for asylum seekers, utilizing ECAR's framework while responding to their community's demographics. This flexibility reflects intentional design. Diya built ECAR to serve all displaced people. The infrastructure, once activated for one population, naturally extends to others. Several ECAR campuses now serve homeless families. Twelve created pathways for undocumented students. Five launched community health clinics.

Diya’s best-in-class approach is gaining traction on a national and global scale. As a consortium member of the Biden Administration’s Welcome Corp program, ECAR was tasked with developing training courses, technical assistance, and resources to participating universities on how to welcome and support refugee students. The Department of Education and the Department of State sent a letter to the president of every college and university in the U.S. urging them to embrace ECAR and become a resettlement campus. Diya has been invited to present her model at the United Nations and the founding chapter is one of the ten global universities of the United Nations Together Action Charter -- which focuses on how colleges and universities can take action to aid the global refugee crisis and promote “respect, safety, and dignity for refugees and migrants.”

Diya Abdo was born in Jordan to Palestinian refugees. Her grandmother, a refugee who left Palestine on a trip to see her brother and was never allowed to return, raised Diya on stories of a homeland she never got to see again.

At age 13, Diya visited a university classroom for the first time and was inspired by teaching as a means of connecting across difference. This led her to the US where she earned a Ph.D. and then returned to Jordan to teach courses in Arab and Islamic Feminism as well as American Literature. In 2008, Diya moved back to the United States, where she joined the faculty at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina.

In 2015, a shared global moment sparked an idea that would become ECAR. When the photo of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi's body washed up on a Turkish beach went viral, Pope Francis called on parishes to host refugee families. Diya looked at her own situation: a professor at a well-resourced college in Greensboro North Carolina, where over 150 languages are spoken, with firsthand knowledge of what displacement does to families. She realized she could channel latent resources, and the environments she knew, to create a better way forward.

"I build for a future I might never see but can always imagine," Diya says. Her vision: every campus a refuge. That would mean 4,000 potential resettlement sites in America alone, and at least 25,000 worldwide. She knows the paradox: "In an ideal world, Every Campus A Refuge wouldn't exist because no one would be forcibly displaced and fleeing violence, famines, and other harms.”

Until that world arrives, Diya works with what we have—building a model for resettlement that is sustainable, dignified, and rooted in community. Systems that last regardless of who's in power, transforming both the people seeking refuge and the communities that welcome them.