Education for Refugees and Migrants
As educators, we believe in the power of education to improve lives and livelihoods. We also believe education is a right, not a privilege.
Our partners, from Blacksburg to Kenya, Galax to Afghanistan, believe the same. Migrants and refugees see education as one of the few sure ways to define their own futures and those of their children. A significant amount of our outreach work has focused on education - broadly defined - for immigrant and refugee populations. Our projects include:
Recruiting and training VT students to tutor K-12 students through Blacksburg Refugee Partnership and Montgomery County Public Schools
Helping Afghan women military veterans in the US improve their conversational English, in partnership with NXT mission
Supporting the student org Primeros Pasos in their mentoring of Latinx students at Galax City High School
Provide college application assistance to women in Afghanistan through the refugee-led She Leads Tomorrow
Our premier partnership is with Elimisha Kakuma. Though separate entities, CRMDS and EK work closely together to promote expanded access to higher education for residents of Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. To learn more about our collaboration, see our page and the EK website.
As our outreach work and collaborations have grown, we have begun to undertake research projects evaluating our projects and other aspects of immigrant and refugee education.
VT-EK Research Group (2024), “Barriers to Education in Kakuma Refugee Camp”
VT-EK Research Group (2025), “Access to Higher Education in Kakuma Refugee Camp”
Nyankiir Diing and Brett Shadle, “A Collaborative Approach to Research in a Refugee Camp: A case study of the Elimisha Kakuma - Virginia Tech student research group” (under review)
Several grants are being prepared to support research on the impact of our outreach work in local schools, with the goal of improving our efforts and sharing best practices.