Foreword

• Author: Paula Green
• Profession: Professor Emerita at the School for International Training Graduate Institute and the Founder of Karuna Center for Peacebuilding
• Pages: 13-15

Barbara Tint, Djimet Dogo and their team in Portland, Oregon offer us an exciting

new avenue for advancing refugee resettlement. They have successfully engaged

with community leaders from the African diasporas who now live in Portland to

build trust and mutual understanding among newer refugees who were enemies on

a distant shore. Rather than carry their enmity and fear of each other into their new

lives, the Diaspora Dialogue Project (DDP) assists recently arrived refugees in

building positive relationships that support their acculturation and integration into

a new homeland. This is compassionate civic engagement at its best.

DDP is also dialogue at its best. Dialogue, this book tells us, is a process of struc-

tured conversations and activities that allow participants to discover the common

ground that binds them as members of the human community. Recognizing core

human needs for safety, security, respect, and well‐being, dialogue members gradu-

ally shed stereotypes and misperceptions of each other, slowly replacing these nega-

tive images with positive thoughts and caring connections. As refugees struggling to

acclimate to a radically new and often confounding environment, these participants

have so much more in common than that which separated them, and through DDP,

they are able to truly benefit by recognizing and acting on this mutuality.

What DDP has accomplished requires a great deal of skill. Results such as former

enemies forging common bonds and recognizing each other’s humanity cannot be

taken for granted. This is conscious, demanding, deliberate, dialogue work, every

activity planned, scrutinized, and amended. That all this was done so well with mixed

facilitation teams of Africans and westerners, academics and community leaders, is

very much to their credit and certainly part of their acceptance by the community.

This volume, presented in attractive and well‐organized form for easy access,

documents the five‐year process of DDP from first vision to final evaluation.

Supported by a generous grant from the Andrus Family Fund and in collaboration

with Portland State University, the Immigration and Refugee Community

Organization (IRCO) and its Africa House, DDP pioneers a unique direction for

FOREWORD

— PAULA GREEN