HENRICO: COUNTY OF REFUGE – How local nonprofits work to assist newcomers fleeing conflict worldwide

Editor's note: This is the first in a special series of articles, produced in partnership with The Chronicle of Philanthropy, examining the nonprofit organizations that are key to helping refugees in Henrico find employment, learn a new language, acclimate to a new community and thrive.

On a warm summer morning, in their apartment in Nottingham Green community off Quioccasin Road in Henrico's Near West End, 18-year-old Sona Safi translated for her father, 53-year-old Hamayoun Nazari, to help him express his experiences settling in Henrico County as refugees fleeing Taliban rule in Afghanistan.

Like other refugees who are escaping war, famine, and unrest who arrive at Richmond International airport, the Safi Nazari family were met there upon their arrival by staffers from Commonwealth Catholic Charities, a Henrico County nonprofit that provides a furnished home, three-months help with rent, health care and food.

Since arriving here less than a year ago to reunite with their teenage son, who was able to escape on the 2021 Operation Allies Welcome airlift as the U.S. military exited and the Taliban took over Afghanistan, the family received help enrolling Safi and her siblings in school, got medical care, enrolled in English language classes, and learned job skills.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees defines refugees as people fleeing conflict, persecution and human rights abuses, and those who have crossed a border into another country. The UNHCR’s most recent report counted 117.31 million people worldwide as refugees – a number that has more than doubled during the past decade.

During the past five years, official resettlement agencies locally – the CCC and the International Rescue Committee – and Jewish Family Services have resettled 2,200 refugees from places of conflict around the world to Henrico County.

In co-operation with the U.S. State Department’s extensive vetting programs, the CCC and the IRC act as approved settlement agencies, providing the initial settlement assistance and orientation to refugees coming from almost a dozen different nationalities – the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central American countries, South Sudan and Syria – with the majority being people from Afghanistan.

Both agencies also assist unaccompanied minors and people who are victims of sex and labor trafficking.

JFS has focused on assisting people from Ukraine resettle in the area.

Henrico has been identified as a welcoming place for these newcomers. After the initial brief and intense services offered by these three nonprofits, these and about a dozen other organizations in Henrico are stepping up to help refugees thrive – offering job coaching, education mapping, English language instruction and affordable health care.

But, even with help, the transition to life here can be bumpy and challenging.

While Nazari ran a small shop in Kandahar, Afghanistan, here he struggles to find a job with his limited English proficiency and a painful back condition.

“I'm not working,” said Nazari. “I’m trying to learn English, but it's so hard for me. Before I came here, I did not even know A-B-C.”

Safi and her siblings work at a supermarket on weekends and after their weekday classes at Freeman High School.

The family’s transition continues to pose many challenges. While they have moved beyond the three-month assistance period provided to refugees by the CCC, the adjustment in a completely new country, language and culture as asylum seekers continues to be difficult. And family members struggle to understand the systems in place here, such as Henrico Social Services’ many resources, that can help them with basic needs.

Nazari said after the three-month support period, when he asked for more help, his social worker told him to look into other government support, but he took that to mean that he should go to the police.

CCC staffers acknowledge three months is a short and intense period of support, due to funding limitations, and point to other ways they continue to help refugees beyond the initial settlement period, such as English classes and meetings with employment navigators.

“We are new here. We need for someone to help us in paying the house, the rent, the bills and applying for green card. We don't know how to do this process,” Safi said, translating for her father.

This summer, by emailing the CCC’s immigration legal assistance services, the Safi Nazari family was added to the long list of clients who will access that help to stabilize their status here.

And Safi intends to fill out a form putting her parents on a list to become clients of ReEstablish Richmond to access the small non-profit organization’s employment navigator assistance for Nazari, and driver’s license and sewing classes and other support services for her mother, Fauzia.

When CCC staff members meet refugees like the Safi Nazari family at Richmond International Airport to bring them to their new housing, they often are asked by the newcomers about Henrico County because it is known as a welcoming and supportive destination, a refuge from violence for many.

Henrico County was a clear choice for the 11-member Afzali family from Afghanistan that settled here in 2021 after being evacuated that year from Kabul through the Operation Allies Welcome airlift as the U.S. evacuated and the Taliban took control of the country.

After being funneled through an intake process in a military base in Texas, the Afzalis (with members who served in the Afghan government) traveled to Henrico, where they had extended family. That particular year was a unique situation, following the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, during which the CCC resettled 79 refugees from around the world in addition to 230 evacuees from Afghanistan.

“We moved by ourselves,” said Walid Afzali, a 32-year-old father of two young children who worked in banking in Afghanistan and here works throughout the country for a company soundproofing buildings.

Walid’s wife, Sajia, 28, is a pre-dental student at Virginia Commonwealth University who also works as a dental assistant. They live in a tidy two-bedroom apartment in Glen Allen. When they first arrived, they lived with Walid’s parents and his three siblings, who are now in their early 20s and are working and studying.

“We took all our paperwork from the military base, and we came here. We went to the CCC to give our case to them for paperwork, for applying for the Social Security card, for a work authorization card, for other stuff too,” Walid Afzali said.

To get to this stable point in their lives, the Afzalis kept in contact with the CCC settlement agency and also with non-profits such as ReEstablish Richmond, whose staffers helped Sajia access classes at the English Language Program at VCU and then helped her transition to a bachelor’s degree program.

'Henrico is really welcoming'

Despite the great challenges and cultural adjustment, both the Afzali and the Safi Nazari families are grateful to have landed in the U.S. and to be far from the violent, dire situations they left, though the frightful experiences they lived and their families continue to experience continue to trouble them.

For Safi, life under the Taliban that barred girls from school beyond sixth grade, meant sitting home instead of continuing her education. She aspires to work as a dental professional and be a “really good dentist” to help people like her mother who suffers from numerous issues with her teeth.

“Henrico County has historically been the home for a refugee,” said Abubakar Abdulrahman, refugee and immigration program manager for CCC's Greater Richmond office in Henrico's Near West End and a refugee from Sudan. “Every refugee that comes in here, the first question is, ‘How can I go to Henrico County?’”

That's because of Henrico’s reputation for good schools and good services, Abdulrahman said. Since 2019, the CCC has resettled about 1,200 refugees and asylum seekers in the greater Richmond area, with about 90% of them in Henrico County.

“I think Henrico is really welcoming and is coming forward to support the newcomers,” Abdulrahman said.

Helping refugees and special immigrant visa holders (mostly people from Afghanistan and Iraq), as well as other eligible people who hold the title of parolee, the term used for foreigners who came to the U.S. for urgent humanitarian reasons, and asylee is just one of many support services the CCC offers. Henrico is one of CCC’s three refugee resettlement communities in Virginia.

Stories behind the numbers

When refugees arrive at a safe location, they are often hungry, traumatized and exhausted after a long and dangerous journey, many carrying little more than the clothes on their backs. To be a refugee settled in the U.S. is a long and complicated process, with many checks.

There are only nine official settlement agencies in the U.S., and two of them – the CCC and the IRC – have offices in Henrico County.

Since the beginning of 2020, the CCC has settled a total of 1,199 refugees in Henrico, from a low of 144 in 2020 to a high of 320 the following year. In 2024, the CCC settled 300 refugees, with the expectation of settling about 350 this year.

As its name indicates, the IRC is an agency that operates around the globe helping in both conflict-ridden zones and in peaceful countries that offer refuge to people seeking escape from war or persecution. The IRC's Henrico office settled 246 refugees here last fiscal year and intends to settle 350 during the current fiscal year – with the majority being families from Afghanistan fleeing the violent Taliban regime.

In 2021, responding to Operation Allies Welcome, IRC settled in Henrico County 632 people from Afghanistan fleeing the Taliban takeover. Those numbers were a significant jump from 2020, when the IRC's local office settled only 79 refugees under President-Elect Donald Trump’s first term.

“It was an enormous challenge at the time, for a very small office,” said Justin Gandy, IRC Richmond office deputy director. “It was a historic moment and not how we normally resettle people into the area. Except for Operation Allies Welcome, it seems like a pretty slow process. Even if there was something going on in the world, such as when many Syrians were leaving. It takes a while for people to get here.”

The special United for Ukraine visa has helped people in that war-torn country settle in Henrico as well, with JFS assisting nearly 200 people in the acclimation and bureaucratic process.

During the last year of the Trump administration in 2020, the U.S. capped the total number of refugees allowed to enter the country at just 15,000, a significant drop from its traditional level. The Migration Policy Institute graphed 1980 as the year with highest number of admitted refugees at 207,000 people.

Refugee admission rose back to 125,000 per year in 2023 and 2024 per President Joe Biden’s Presidential Determination on Refugees Admission. And with those increases, each year the CCC and the IRC received more federal funds funneled through the Virginia Department of Social Services.

For the CCC Richmond office, that meant those federal funds, the highest portion of refugee funding support from the resettlement agencies, going from $759,000 in 2020 to $1,510,000 this year. For the IRC Henrico office, federal funding has more than doubled going from $597,000 in 2020 to $2,717,000 in 2023.

While Biden has set refugee admission to the U.S. at 125,000, with the recent election, the MPI, the CCC and the IRC have all put out statements of concern of what a Trump administration would mean for the U.S. acting as a country of refuge for those fleeing danger. Trump has promised to halt all refugee admissions on the first day he returns to office. He said he would reinstate a moratorium on travel to the United State for people from certain predominantly Muslim countries and he said he would launch the “largest deportation program in history.”

Nonprofits serving refugees

As part of a series of articles and with the support of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the Henrico Citizen will provide a snapshot of Henrico County’s refugee neighbors. The reporting in this series will depict the system that serves refugees in Henrico County, along with the stories of the refugees themselves, and the extent of the efforts performed by key settlement agencies, nonprofits and volunteers that serve them.

The stories also will be told by the numbers – including the number of people helped and the amount of funding and resources allocated towards those efforts. The series will shine a light on the many volunteers who have stepped up to assist refugees thrive and describe how a community of Henrico’s size activates to address refugees’ needs so that they can thrive, in the context of the county’s increasingly diverse population and other challenges such as transportation, employment and housing.

Starting over in a new, unfamiliar place after experiencing violence often is a difficult struggle. Refugees are faced with many challenges including maintaining affordable housing, learning a new language, mastering personal and public transportation, finding a job, securing work, developing a career, affording possessions, succeeding in education and addressing health issues. Key among those needs to be met are mental health issues.

The basic needs that people who arrive with the most minimal of belongings are the responsibility of the settlement agencies. After that point, other organizations are invested in helping refugees acclimate and prosper.

The ability to serve refugees can be influenced by political vicissitudes and generosity. The will to support those in need can affect funding, energies of the groups that serve them and the amount of community assistance.

Refugees’ needs at the beginning of their settlement are significant. Without support, and left in isolation, refugees struggle to fulfill their economic, personal and educational potential. Support beyond the first months here impacts success in many aspects of their lives.

In this series, expect to:
• read about the successes that come when refugees like Mantu Market owner Hamidullah Nouri are furnished with resources, knowledge and opportunities.

• meet refugees and learn their stories of those crucial and impactful moments that set them on their journeys, as well as how they are settling into their new homes in Henrico County;

• better understand the needs, challenges and triumphs of Henrico's refugee population;

• learn how nonprofit organizations, their staff and volunteers impact refugees’ lives in Henrico County;

• learn how the community can better understand refugees’ presence and experience in Henrico and how neighbors can assist in those efforts.

This article was reported through a fellowship supported by the Lilly Endowment and administered by the Chronicle of Philanthropy to expand coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits. The Henrico Citizen is solely responsible for all content.