At Arrive Ministries, even our board members volunteer with the refugee families we welcome! Our Board Vice Chair, Mindy Conradi, recently left a meeting in a rush letting our staff know that she was heading out to babysit for the Afghan family that her Good Neighbor team
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Coming to a new place is overwhelming; now imagine that you don’t speak the language, you have never experienced cold weather, and you must navigate complicated government systems. For many refugees and immigrants, this deluge of overwhelming new experiences is common. For one refugee family from
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Without ever meeting Luay, a team of volunteers expressed their love for his family through sweat equity and a new-found skill. This summer a group of volunteers from two churches built a wheelchair ramp for Luay, one of our clients from Iraq. The house the family moved
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One year ago, a crisis like no other. As the U.S. was responding to the urgent humanitarian crisis following the military withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, the Kakar family, following their emergency evacuation, was staying on a military base in Virginia. Within days of arriving, unsure of
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After hearing about her sister’s involvement with refugees in Michigan, Kim felt called to support refugees and immigrants in her own Twin Cities community. The meaningful and relational nature of Arrive Ministries’ Good Neighbor teams drew her to join seven other members of her church in forming
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Mohammad Qadeer was a high-level accountant in Afghanistan. When he was separated from his family in the evacuation from Afghanistan and resettled in Minnesota in December of 2021, he assumed the competitive U.S. job market wouldn’t allow for him to pursue a career in the finance sector,
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On February 24, 2022 Iryna and Oleg Svavolia’s family of 9 had tickets to fly from Kyiv, Ukraine to Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Svavolias were fleeing as refugees. “About two days before they were due to arrive I got a travel cancelled notification for the Svavolias due to
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Navigating the freedoms and challenges of adulthood crosses cultural boundaries, as twenty-somethings Amy and Klohbaw are learning. Amy from Minnesota and Klohbaw, who is a Karen refugee, met through Arrive Ministries’ Good Neighbor program, and quickly bonded over their shared stage of life. “We are sharing this
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This Congolese family of 9 arrived in June, and when I visited their house the next day, we had issues getting the data to work on their phones. I brought the oldest son and the sister-in-law to a Caribou coffee shop so that we could try to
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One of our housing providers, Bet, summed up her experience of renting to refugees wonderfully, “We always thought investing in real estate was a good idea, we never could have imagined where this journey would take us.” Over a year ago, a duplex in Bet and her
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