From sponsorship to citizenship, one woman’s support of Afghan newcomers
Dana has filled her life with a longstanding compassion and commitment to supporting refugees. Today, she works directly with green card holders as a Welcome.US Citizen Guide, supporting aspiring Americans as they navigate the final steps to citizenship.
For Dana, this work is more than a volunteer opportunity—it’s the continuation of a life dedicated to service. As the granddaughter of Eastern European refugees, the stories she grew up hearing about their immigrant experiences are intertwined with her personal history.
I believe in my core that this country is built on the blood, sweat, and toil of immigrants.
Her father was a world traveler, and he encouraged Dana to do the same. This stuck with her, specifically at a time when women were not afforded the same opportunities as men.
“Respect for others, giving to others, doing the best you can, working to your full capacity, not disparaging others: Those were the values that I was raised with,” she shared.
In college, she spent a year in Geneva studying international law and living with students from around the world. Dana petitioned her school to have this study-abroad experience, which didn’t previously exist.
After college, she planned to get a Master’s in International Affairs, but wasn’t accepted into the programs she applied to. She views these experiences not as failures but as redirections, soon moving to New York to work as an assistant to Ambassador Abdul Rahman Pazhwak during his years as Afghanistan's representative to the United Nations and as President of the General Assembly.
“That detour and opportunity changed my life.”
In this role, Dana spent time in Afghanistan and quickly fell in love with the country.
After graduating from law school in the early 1970s, she and her husband took a year off from professional life, bought a Volkswagen Beetle in Germany, and drove to Afghanistan. “That reinforced and sealed our love of Afghanistan."
"What stood out was the beauty of the country,” she reflected, “The lush orchards and vineyards, woodlands, grapevines... the hospitality of the Afghans. No matter where we went, we were welcomed into their homes.”
After those early career experiences, whenever there was a crisis in Afghanistan, Dana felt a call to help—and she has always answered.
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, many of her Afghan friends came to the U.S. as refugees.
We helped them and shared their pain,” Dana said. “We were very involved with the plight of refugees.”
Dana remembers the attacks on Sept.11, 2001 vividly. Her New York office was at the top of a building with a view of the World Trade Center. “I spent weeks after the attack watching the smoke from what was the towers.”
As the war continued, Dana and her husband found themselves asking, “How can we help rebuild Afghanistan?”
Knowing that agriculture was the main driver of the Afghan economy and that war had destroyed a vast number of trees, Dana understood how she needed to give back to this country that had been known as “The Orchard of Central Asia”. She, her husband, and two Afghan-American friends co-founded Global Partnership for Afghanistan, whose mission was to enable Afghan farmers, most of whom were returning refugees, to rebuild their vineyards, orchards, and other small farm businesses.
“We made many trips to Afghanistan during that period of time from 2003 to 2014. We seeded 30,000 farm businesses, a third of which were women-owned,” Dana shared.
The organization helped support thousands of farm families to revitalize their businesses and plant more than 1 million trees.
“We saw a country during that period of time where people were trying to rebuild their lives,” Dana said. “There were many parts of the country that were not at war, but as the media mainly covered the war, people saw Afghanistan only as a country still at war.”
Through personal relationships and by taking action, Dana has repeatedly shown her deep care and compassion for Afghanistan.
“We became involved in helping many of our former employees apply for Special Immigrant Visas; far too few have been successful,” Dana said. “Many of them, though fully qualified and vetted, were and are stuck in the pipeline with no pathway here.”
For a time, Dana watched these families find success as they started over outside of Afghanistan. In 2019, a former employee came to the U.S. with her husband and four children. Starting over with limited resources, they now own their own home, and their oldest son is attending college.
Today, it is much more difficult for Afghans to get their Special Immigrant Visa—the program is paused, and there is an overall ban on admitting Afghan refugees to the U.S.
What’s going on in Afghanistan, especially the impact on women and girls, is one of the largest tragedies facing humankind, and unfortunately, the world has closed their eyes to it.
Dana and her husband are part of an informal sponsorship group, waiting to provide support to the three daughters of an SIV holder and former employee. The former employee is in the U.S., but his daughters are stuck abroad. Through Welcome.US’s Veteran Sponsor Fund, Dana and her husband had raised the funds needed to reunite the family. This group has been cleared for entry since February 2025, but with the pause on refugee admissions, they remain overseas.
After decades of exploring the country and building lifelong friendships, Dana has a perspective that cuts through many misconceptions about Afghan newcomers.
“The Afghan people, like most people, have the same goals and dreams for their families as we do: to educate their children, to live a healthy life, to have a roof over their heads, to have a job,” Dana said. “The Afghans who are refugees or immigrants in this country want to live the American dream.”
These shared values and pursuit of the “American dream” mirror Dana’s own family journey: “I think the American dream is peace and security, respect for individuals, and being able to worship as you please; to educate your family, to have a job, and be able to sustain yourself. Fundamentally, that’s the American dream. It’s not more complicated than that.”
To support others on that path to a secure and stable life in the U.S., Dana became a Welcome.US Citizen Guide, tutoring an Afghan green card holder through the citizenship process.
Volunteering with the Citizen Guide program was a natural next step for Dana, thanks to her civic engagement and experience as a sponsor.
“I could do it on my own schedule, and I believed in it,” she said. “If I could help one or more people become citizens who were motivated and had their green cards, that would make me happy.”
She described the training provided by Welcome.US for the volunteer role as well organized, informative, and manageable. Dana recognizes she probably has less of a learning curve because of her deep understanding of immigration pathways—even still, she said, “Many U.S. citizens would likely find the citizenship test challenging. ”
Knowing how meaningful U.S. citizenship is to those who are applying, it gives me great satisfaction to support them in that journey and help them achieve that highly valued goal. I not only learn along with them; I also take pride in seeing them understand how the U.S. government works and what makes the U.S. remarkable.
For Dana, volunteering as a Citizen Guide has shined a bright light on the true weight of citizenship—something she said those born here often take for granted. Seeing the sacrifices citizenship applicants make reinforces her belief that active, educated participation in democracy is the ultimate safeguard of our collective freedom.
“It’s so important for people to be engaged,” Dana said, looking toward the future of the country her family helped build. “Understanding how our government works and the importance of voting has to be part of our civic instruction. The ultimate power that we have individually and collectively is the vote.”
Nearly 9 million green card holders are currently eligible to begin the naturalization process. For many, simple acts of support and words of encouragement from a volunteer Citizen Guide are all it takes to complete the journey to citizenship.
