When I talk about the Lab, I always emphasize how the two parts of the Lab fit together. That is, how the face to face friendships we have tried to coalesce over the years make it possible for us to address structural challenges related to resettlement.

So, I often say something like this: “What we have learned from the many intimate relationships in the lab over the years has helped us understand how to address structural challenges in regard to resettlement and migration in Durham and beyond.

This kind of sentence always sounds and feels right. I/we certainly believe that community change emerges from the actual, prose bound lives of people. I/we desperately want to believe that the day to day struggles of members of the lab have helped us develop effective projects in the areas of education, transportation, and the development of social and cultural capital.

Recently, I have come to think that while the words sound right, they are rarely true. We have had a good number of individual successes,  but changes in policy and practice and institutional change—both in regard to organizations like schools and cultural arrangements like social capital-- has been much rarer.  We usually never get there.

Despite our best intentions, what passes for change usually involves developing individual, “one-off” workarounds that enable one young adult (and then perhaps their younger siblings and in some cases their parents) to successfully negotiate one of the many bat-shit crazy everyday challenges associated with resettlement in the US today.  Yes, after days and then weeks, countless texts and phone calls, innumerable well-intentioned miscommunications Mariam (not her real name), a young community college student, was able to finally correct and refile her families 2018 tax return so her FASFA form could be processed. Need more mundane insanity, how about this: Idris (not his real name), Mustafa Mohmmed and I are still trying to figure out how he should fill out a FASFA form that only allows for last names that have no more than 16 letters (his of course has 17 letters).

Devising work arounds to meet these kinds of challenges must, of course, be done. But we no longer believe—if we ever did--that the forms will ever be simple enough for an eighteen-year-old newcomer to complete for her family and/or that the knowledge required to complete the forms will be anything but special, local and even exotic for most of us in the lab, never mind for most young adults and families in Durham.

This has me thinking in new ways about where we are and where we might go in this space. This thinking and (future) doing can be summarized as follows:

1. It is not that we don’t know the value of individual work arounds or what structural looks like.

We recognize the impact of these work arounds and the profound individual level opportunities they make possible. Again, and again, we have seen how these work arounds make attending college or retaining Medicaid possible, and how older siblings in the lab have passed on their new knowledge to parents and younger family members.

For the Lab, that the process of encountering and overcoming these day to day obstacles allows us to understand resettlement (opportunity, mobility, and so on) in a manner that would not be possible from the research or policy level.

We also know that the Lab is capable ofmaking structural change—in the past years we have played a pivotal role in getting bus seating in Durham, successfully piloted a mentoring and coaching program with Duke Alumni that transmitted social and cultural capital necessary for mobility, and produced a podcast highlighting how newcomers can negotiate Durham Public Schools.

2. But knowledge of the value of individual work arounds, is not a substitute for structural change nor does it make it more likely to happen.

There are some structural reasons why structural change has been rare. The challenges that refugee youth encounter are at once so exotic and so intractable that they are not easily addressed by existing programs and initiative.

The everyday craziness that many refugee young people experience is simply inconceivable to most of us—"he got a high School Diploma but can’t take any credit bearing classes at Durham Tech for two years. I can’t believe that, there must be some mistake?” The simple implausibility of so much of refugee life makes it unlikely these issues will be policy imperatives.

Moreover, even the most sympathetic administrators believe if you just addressed the “language issue” everything would be fine for refugee students. This framing obscures the larger opportunity structure at work, here the benefits of knowing, what might be called, U.S. “common sense” is and how it operates—that is, the taken for granted ways parents who “know” get official decisions changed or problems solved.   (Many young adults in the Lab and their families knew the common sense in their home country, but don’t yet know U.S. common sense.)

This framing also obscures the fact that it isn’t only refugee students who deal with everyday bat-shit crazy in schools. We have found that economically disadvantaged young adults and students of color experience many of the same problems that refugee students do. Here, the problem is there these problems are the most intractable in the school district and there are very few actual scalable initiatives—though lots of programs, plans and budget items-- and thus hardly any partners we could work with to start on the structural change that is needed.

As outlined in a previous blog, the organizations that need to change at a structural level—for example, Durham Public Schools—are set up to respond to individual complaints and are usually neither able nor willing to make structural change in collaboration with community members.  Just like us, principals and school officials are experts at individual workarounds, especially for the most intractable problems, say, like ensuring students can read before they leave high school. (One workaround is simply giving the student a diploma.)

Finally, the individual level change we have made is unsustainably slow and labor intensive.  (It is unsustainable in part because and individual change even if aggregated is occurring very, very slowly.) This reality has a cluster of implications.

First, most of the challenges that migrant youth are encountering are technical and administrative (as opposed to adaptive and by definition) and thus have a right answer or a solution, but, here the rub, the solution can’t be sent via a link or an APP. Instead the solution needs to be illustrated or shownin a manner that is collaborative and empowering. The coordination required for this collaborative showing is very labor intensive.

Second, the slowness of individual level change hinders the learning we want students to acquire in the lab. The lab is designed to help all the students—Durham students and Duke students alike--learn to bring knowledge (methods and new information) to bear on migration issues. The slowness of change frustrates students—high school and college students alike--because they see little or no impact in their work. It is important to be honest about how community change actually occurs (this is part of the educational process in the lab), but honesty is often not enough to keep even good students engaged.

3. Ok, now what… A Modest Proposal

One place to begin to address this challenge is to more aggressively and self- consciously collect, disseminate and aggregate individual work arounds we have developed over the years.

This year we will explore the possibility of an EducationSolution Shop in the lab. The “shop,” which would potentially open for business in the spring, would be staffed by a team of Duke undergrads and Durham students and would develop and disseminate solutions to common challenges that migrant and similarly situated youth encounter—"here is how to keep your medicaid, when can we work together to start go through the steps together so you can do this for your dad and mom?”  Specifically,  the shop would:

• collect work arounds and solutions that have been developed in the lab over the years and the kinds of support that have been successful in the past. (We have not done a good job of collecting and making available the workarounds and styles of support that we have already developed—if you could see my google drive!)
• Devise solution (including styles of support) to address new challenges.
• Package these solutions—new and old-- in easily accessible and standard formats.
• Disseminate these work arounds (with human supports) within the migration communities at the Kenan Institute and beyond. I envision a physical and virtual shop where students and their families from around Durham and from every background can come to get solutions and encouragement.
• Finally, and critically, actively look for opportunities to scale solutions developed in the shop, either in collaboration with community members or Durham organizations. (We need to learn from the times we have done this in the past. For example, two years ago we developed a check list for the District that would help ensure that ESL juniors in DPS were offered the opportunity to avail of the testing accommodations they were entitled to by the ACT. What made this possible? )