Preparing new homes that help D.C. area refugees thrive

A Q&A with Noah Klose, Homes Not Borders, a Welcome.US Partner

In our nation’s capital, residents of Washington, D.C., and its surrounding communities regularly welcome newcomers from around the world. Noah Klose, Director of Community Outreach at Homes Not Borders, a Welcome.US partner, works with local agencies and volunteers to set up new homes for refugees coming to the D.C. area. Last year, Homes Not Borders helped more than 400 refugee families move into fully furnished homes.

The Welcome.US team joined Homes Not Borders for a home setup in honor of World Refugee Day in June, and connected with Noah to learn more about their expanding efforts.

Can you share how your work with Homes Not Borders began and why the mission is important to you?

I had a family friend who actually used to be a board member on HNB, and he was talking to my dad and said, "It sounds like Noah was doing a lot of similar stuff in Arizona to this organization I'm on the board for." And so I talked to the executive director and started going on setups with them once a week, or once every two weeks. That was back when refugee flows were low and HNB was still very small, so at most, they would do one [home setup] a week. I think there was one week we did three, and that was considered an insane amount, which is funny because we'll see three a day pretty regularly now.

We had just gotten 503(c) accreditation in 2019, so things were still very small and new. And then Kabul fell in August 2021.

[They] basically offered me a job because we went from doing one or two setups a week to, I think we peaked at 18 in November 2021, and they needed people who could manage volunteers... We were lucky because HNB was probably the only place in the area that had a warehouse. We were the one place that could take everything and hold on to it and actually use it, instead of having to return it [right] away or do ad hoc stuff. And having a warehouse really made it so that we had this sort of longevity that we do now.

Why is the mission important? As is common with a lot of people who work in resettlement, there's a personal connection. My grandparents were Lithuanian refugees, and they were pretty active in the exile community. My grandfather helped found one of the major exile organizations. And my mom was born here, but her first language was Lithuanian. She didn't learn English until she had to go to public school. Me and Lina, my sister, were born after the occupation of the Baltic states ended, but we still grew in this exile-ish community of people who came [to the U.S.] a lot and went back [to Lithuania]. I have a lot of cousins who stayed and family who visited quite regularly. I was there last summer.

We just grew up very aware. Age 5, I knew that my grandparents lived in refugee camps and liked to tell the whole story of the journey. That's what they did with my mom because it was important for them to be like, "Listen, we need to keep the culture and the history alive because we don't know if it's going to survive the Soviet occupation." And so, it's very easy [to relate] with my clients and the families of my clients.

Homes Not Borders provides comprehensive services for refugee newcomers to help them feel at home in the D.C. area. Last year, you set up homes for more than 400 people. From donations to volunteer coordination to home setups, what is typically involved to get one family settled into a new home?

I did the math, and to get a family in, it requires about 46 working man hours. It takes three warehouse volunteers and six setup volunteers 46 man hours from start to finish.

A trusted agency or community group will reach out and say, "Hey, we have a family." The agencies are either Ethiopian Community Development Council, Lutheran Social Services of the National Capital Area, and IRC Maryland. Those are the three major resettlement agencies in the area. Either their housing departments will reach out, or one of the community organizations we work with will.

We have a warehouse manager who oversees our warehouse volunteers, and they go to our warehouse and pull things from there. It's a 1,500-square-foot warehouse with shelves going up probably two to three stories, and it's all donated goods. People drop them off. Sometimes we'll buy things. We buy bags, we buy lamps and rugs, occasionally we need to add some kitchen items. But for the most part, I think about 80–90% of the stuff we use is donated…

Ideally, when everything works well, and it does 95% of the time, I show up the morning of a home setup with volunteers. I'll pull out that rack and start unloading beds and some of the bulkier stuff from the warehouse, and by the time all the volunteers show up, there's a nice little pile out front. People just put it in their cars, walk down to our furniture warehouse, and then help me move the furniture into the truck. And at the same time, we have our drivers and movers [for] moving assistance and donation assistance.

[As you said], we helped 400 families last year… that's 400 families, so that's 400 racks, roughly 2,000 beds, 400 couches, 400 dining tables, probably another 2,000 dining chairs, probably about 1,000 to 1,400 dressers. It's a massive amount. In both of our warehouses, we go through everything in roughly every two or three weeks. If we're running at full capacity, the shelf life of a piece of furniture is about two weeks in our warehouse.

What are some of the trends either on the volunteer side or on the home setup side that you’ve experienced?

D.C. has always been a hub for Afghan resettlement. Even before Kabul fell, there's been an Afghan population here since the 1980s, which was really helpful because, when we were one of the three or four hubs that a lot of families got sent to because there were family connections, there was a community network that could help. There are a lot of people who volunteered, not necessarily with us, but in the volunteer or nonprofit ecosystem in D.C., who are the kids of families who came in the 80s… And they stepped up a lot. It's made resettlement in D.C. easier for a lot of families.

After Kabul fell, I think, it was something like, 95 or 98% of the families we were working with were Afghan. Now we're trending down to probably about 75%... We're seeing slightly more Venezuelans. This has always been a hub for Central Americans, so that's not super surprising. We're seeing—because families are getting bused up—a lot more asylum seekers who are not receiving support because nobody tells anyone that they're coming up. They'll get a day or two's notice. Agencies and community groups have to focus everything on those first days the people come up, and then nothing. I guess the busing was probably the biggest change that [got us connected to] a lot of organizations we now work with because there are families who are claiming asylum and show up here and don't have any support.

And then in terms of volunteers, we've been very lucky that we have a lot of volunteers, to the point where, this year, I haven't really had to go out and look for volunteer groups. They come to me because we've been around long enough. We make it super easy to volunteer. You basically have to show up with your car, and we'll handle everything else. We have that core group, and that's very helpful in that it keeps us on track. We have volunteers who work for the setup and can put a bunk bed together in like 30 minutes. We have the warehouse volunteers who come in every day to help organize that stuff. They're more valuable than their weight in gold because they just know the systems. They know what to expect.

People don't think about how long it takes to resettle families. I still run into people today who hear about my job, and they ask, "Why are Afghans still coming in?" or, "Are you seeing Ukrainians?," or that sort of thing. And they're kind of shocked when I'm like, "Yeah, they never stopped." People just stopped reporting on it.

The home setup experience truly impacted the Welcome.US volunteers! One thing volunteers do not do is meet the family moving into the new space. What are some of the reactions and feedback you receive from the refugee newcomers you serve?

[Now] we bring tea kettles because our family director said, "Every Afghan I know drinks tea. You should just include that if you have it, because they're going to ask for it anyway." That's why we have a family service director [who goes] and checks. We do get feedback.

It's different because 75% of our families are Afghan, but then that other 25% is such a myriad of different ethnicities and nationalities and cultures that it's hard to tailor things necessarily to [them]. If we know a family is Muslim, we can bring certain things. Sometimes, every now and then, somebody who can donate prayer mats will bring those. Around the holidays, if we're 100% sure a family's Christian, [volunteers] will drop off little Christmas trees. We've brought plastic utensils and plates for kids under the age of 2.

We've [gotten] feedback, and we refined the list [accordingly]... I kind of tailor my job around [the idea that] if everything's going right, we never see the family.

You get a wide spectrum of stories that come out, and a couple of them have been families who… talk about how when they walk in, they're just kind of shocked because every door they open, there's new stuff.

There's one guy who talked about how his wife kept going to the kitchen and kept opening all the cabinets because there were so many dishes and appliances and kitchenware. We got a text from a guy last Monday: "Words cannot express our gratitude for your support, providing us with what we needed. A heartfelt thank you for you, your colleagues and the entire Homes Not Borders team. Your work is truly commendable. It has brought smiles to families today. May Allah bless you with the best life."... That's always nice to hear.

What is the best way for Welcomers to support the work of Homes Not Borders?

With HNB—because we just do such a myriad of things—if you want to donate money, we can obviously take that, if you want to volunteer, we can arrange that. We have an Amazon wish list. If you want to say, "I specifically want to see what this [donation] is going to do," you can always do that. We try to make it pretty simple and easy to just show up and volunteer with a group, or volunteer as a newbie. We're happy to pick up donations in the greater D.C. area. We have a vocational program where we'll help pay rent for families undergoing vocational training for three months. So if there's somebody who's interested in being a remote mentor, we could use that.

We have an online artisan store, which is all handmade goods by refugee artisans that we work with. They get 80% of the sale price, 20% goes into maintaining the website and helping to get materials because we'll get them sewing machines if they need them, or provide them supplies, that sort of thing… I think we sold $6,000 worth of merchandise last year. That is a little bit over $5,000 that goes directly into our families' pockets.

We are where we are because the right people were in the right place, right time, and [we have] a crew of very dedicated volunteers from when HNB was very small. They just sort of latched on and stayed. Every single person, I think, that is part of the staff, either started as a volunteer, or someone who receives services from us. We are so lucky to have the volunteers and the community groups that we have.