52 NOVEMBER 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL of agencies and staff, significant drops in refugee admission numbers, and undermining of resettlement infrastructure and support— we found ourselves face to face with nearly 80,000 Afghan evacuees who needed the kind of support we were no longer in a place to quickly and nimbly provide. But higher education institutions also found themselves facing other issues, including continued disengagement from students during and after the pandemic, inaccessibility of international and global programming (e.g., study abroad), and lack of relevance and attention to student needs. Under [State’s] Welcome Corps, ordinary Americans can now privately and directly sponsor refugees. Hosted refugees, students, faculty, staff, and community members of Every Campus A Refuge chapters at the ECAR 2022 Gathering. Imagining the Possibilities Imagine the possibilities for our alma maters, for the universities, colleges, and community colleges in our American towns and cities, where our family members study, where we teach and work, and on whose boards we sit. And now imagine the possibilities for the world. There are nearly 25,000 institutions of higher education around the globe. And though they might be vastly different in significant ways, they are fundamentally the same in others: They are all communities, bound together by shared goals and values, occupying shared spaces, designed to support humans succeed. With the current trends in forced migration and the threat of large-scale displacement due to climate disasters, any one of us, or our children, or their children, can become displaced. By creating resettlement campuses, we are planting and tending a garden that will feed future generations. We are building sustainable ecosystems that can support us in our darkest hour. n AUTUMN HOLLIFIELD PHOTOGRAPHY
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODIyMDU=