EVENT HIGHLIGHTS
We are pleased to announce a Niagara Forum with Mette Brogden, State Refugee Coordinator of Wisconsin. The title of her talk is “Refugee Odysseys”. We are thankful to Turkish American Society of Wisconsin for being co-organizer for this talk.
Short abstract:
This year, approximately 85,000 refugees will resettle in the United States from overseas, coming from Burma, Congo, Iraq, Nepal, Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan, Syria, and many other places in the world. They are people with a well-founded fear of persecution in their home countries who have passed two years of background checks in order to come to America and re-make a home. Of these, in 2016, 1500 will come to Wisconsin. And of these, approximately 1200 will come to Milwaukee.
Refugees are leaving behind everything they thought they knew to enter a foreign society and make a place and new life for themselves. They are starting without status other than as refugees. What they do, who helps them and how, and what we—and they—consider to be a successful resettlement, will be discussed by Wisconsin’s State Refugee Coordinator in this forum event.
RSVP: [email protected]
Date:
Thursday, March 31th, 2016
6:00 PM
** Turkish homemade refreshments will be served
Venue:
Niagara Foundation Milwaukee Office
6011 S 27th. Street, Greenfield, WI , 53221
Mette Brogden is the State Refugee Coordinator for Wisconsin. She holds a Ph.D. in medical and cultural anthropology from The University of Arizona. An experienced clinical social worker, Mette provided psychotherapy services for the first 15 years of her career in community mental health centers in both rural and urban settings in Iowa and Arizona. While a doctoral student at UA, she served as a neutral mediator/facilitator with governments and stakeholders from local to national levels to craft environmental policy approaches and agreements for The University of Arizona’s Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy.
Mette started in the refugee field as a researcher for the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology at UA in 2002. Since then, she has: served as a family ties volunteer for Somali Bantu refugees arriving to Tucson; directed a refugee resettlement program in Tucson; secured over $2 million in funding and mentored three Somali Bantu mutual assistance associations in Texas and Arizona through startup and delivery of their first three years of services; completed the Harvard Certificate Program in Refugee Trauma; provided technical assistance to ORR-funded Refugee Healthy Marriage programs across the U.S. on program evaluation, refugee trauma, working with African and pre-literate populations, and directed program evaluation at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services (LIRS) in Baltimore, MD—a national Volag with a local resettlement agency affiliate in Wisconsin (Lutheran Social Services). She has served as the Wisconsin State Refugee Coordinator for four years.
Her recently-completed dissertation, Refugee Odysseys: A Vertical Ethnography of Refugee Resettlement in the U. S. after 9-11, is based on participant observation and key informant interviews of resettlement stakeholders (including refugees themselves) in 13 states and Washington, D.C., and examines the phenomenology of refugees resettling in the U.S. after the terrorist attacks in the U.S. on September 11, 2001.