Founded in 2017, Hello Neighbor is a post-settlement refugee program that pairs refugees with American citizens as part of a four-month mentorship program to support refugees in self-sufficiency and integration into the community.

We are really excited to be a newly launched initiative and have gotten great traction in just a few months. We create community events in addition to the mentors and mentees getting together to help create community in the program and support each other. Some of those events have a cost and that is where we are focusing for the Awesome Without Borders Grant.

Being a refugee here in the U.S. is incredibly isolating. They go to school and work and come home. To have opportunities to make American friends and do American things is completely foreign to them. Hello Neighbor is the first opportunity many of them have, whether they have been here 6 months or 5 years, to interact with American families.