THE TWO AFRICAN refugees arrived in Oneonta, New York—a quaint, upstate college town of just over 12,000 people—in summer 2023. By then a group of volunteers had been preparing for them for “six, seven, eight years.” Mark Wolff, communication chair of The Otsego Refugee Resettlement Coalition (ORRC), says his group had to put its hopes of helping refugees on hold during the Trump administration, which cut the refugee cap to its lowest level ever. Even after Joe Biden’s inauguration, with promises of a more humane immigration policy on the horizon, things didn’t look good for their plans: Oneonta was more than an hour away from the requisite refugee caseworkers in Utica. During the bitter upstate New York winters, help would be even slower to arrive.
The ORRC had already begun to raise money and identify community partners. It had done its homework and it had momentum. So when the Biden administration announced the Welcome Corps—an initiative that would let private citizens take the lead on sponsoring and supporting refugees, rather than the longstanding government-led approach—the coalition knew it had found its way to welcome newcomers. “We were one of the first [private sponsor groups] in the United States to get approval,” Wolff says.
A handful of people make up the sponsor group’s core steering committee, which meets weekly. But around 100 volunteers support the refugees in a broader capacity, with everyone from the mayor to the local Rotary Club getting involved. When some townspeople expressed concerns about the newcomers—particularly as New York City dealt with an influx of asylum seekers and bused many of them upstate—the Republican-dominated Otsego County Board of
