May Dugan Center Awarded $50,000 for Refugee Center in Cleveland

The funding will go toward assisting those displaced by overseas conflicts in obtaining housing, employment and more.

Refugees from around the world may find safe harbor in Cleveland a little more easily thanks to new funding for the May Dugan Center, a nonprofit organization that serves the Near West Side and Greater Cleveland area.

In a unanimous vote in late April, Cleveland City Council awarded the May Dugan Center $50,000 to fund the organization’s Refugee Services Center.

The May Dugan Center’s Refugee Services Center opened last August, after it became a partner agency with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). Since its opening, the Refugee Services Center has helped place and aid more than 150 refugees from Sudan, Congo, Afghanistan and Latin America. 

Sarah Edelman, director of the Refugee Services Center, said the new money will be used to support new staff for the growing program.

“As we know, housing is very expensive, transportation is very expensive, so we have to, until they have a job, provide those services for them,” she said. “A lot of that money is going to be used to supplement [the support] we get from HIAS.”

HIAS, originally founded in 1903, is a secular Jewish-American nonprofit that was originally founded to aid Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in eastern Europe. Now, it serves forcibly-displaced people from all over the world through advocacy and resettlement.

Alicia Wrenn, vice president of resettlement and integration for the organization, said HIAS works with 30 implementing partners for resettlement in the United States. 

“That work is pretty comprehensive,” Wrenn said. “Because people have been in challenging situations, oftentimes for many years, and they come here and they’re sort of tasked with remaking their lives, picking themselves back up, going to work and having their kids be successful in school and all that other good stuff. But it takes a level of support.”

In addition to partners in the United States, HIAS has operations in 23 countries around the world. The organization actively works with refugees, helping them find placement through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) or other agencies, like the Safe Mobility Initiative in the Western Hemisphere.

Wrenn said that on a national scale, the affordable housing crisis has affected refugee resettlement efforts greatly. 

“The national affordable housing crisis slams us right in the face,” she said. “Because refugees come here, they have no jobs to start, they have no credit history, so they’re kind of the bottom of the rung in terms of who a landlord might rent to. So, it’s really hard given how little affordable housing stock there is. It’s very hard to house people.”

This is something Rick Kemm, executive director of the May Dugan Center, has witnessed in Cleveland as well. 

“There’s not an abundance of affordable housing in Cleveland, or across the country for that matter,” he said. “But, our role is to work with landlords to find a place. And sometimes it’s not easy to get the landlord to agree on a lease because these refugees are dependent upon a stipend from the government.”

Edelman said securing employment for refugees is another challenge. She said the May Dugan Center has served refugees who, before arriving in the United States, were laborers, neurosurgeons and journalists, among other occupations.

“We have people who worked in construction, people who were farmers,” Edelman said. “So finding employment is, I think, the most critical part of this whole process, because making sure that they can sustain themselves is really the goal.”

Kemm said May Dugan’s food distribution, housing and educational services working in conjunction with the Refugee Resettlement Center are what helps it thrive, even despite housing and employment difficulties.

“What differentiates May Dugan from some of the other refugee resettlement agencies, and what makes us so unique, is that we already have a lot of wrap-around services in place,” he said.

In addition to its new Refugee Services Center, the May Dugan Center is home to a Food and Clothing Distribution program, Behavioral Health Center, Education and Resource Center, Trauma Recovery Center and Senior Outreach Center. 

In 2023, the May Dugan Center provided 623,483 meals through the Food Distribution program and helped 584 victims of crime in the areas it serves. Its Educational Resource Center expects to see a 38 percent increase in students in 2024.

Investigations from the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) found that hate crimes are at the highest reported rate since they began tracking hate crimes in 1991. Groups like the Anti-defamation League and the Council on American-Islamic Relations have reported rises in both antisemitic and anti-islamic incidents between October and December of 2023, with the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war.

Kemm said the May Dugan Center is not an exception to these trends, and that misconceptions about refugees are harmful. 

“These people that we’re welcoming are doing nothing more than looking for a better place to live,” he said.