Blog

When describing the work I do here at TSOS, I often say, we try to help people “step into each other’s stories.” Lately, I’ve been doing more of that myself.

Their Story is Our Story (TSOS) was pleased to present at the 2023 Idaho Conference on Refugees held at Boise State University on February 22-23. In alignment with the conference theme Creating Connections, our TSOS team addressed three significant invisible barriers that we consistently encounter in our work and invited audience members to think about how local community members might leverage their inter- and intra- connections to help Forcibly Displaced Persons overcome invisible barriers so they might achieve an equal footing in society.

Their Story is Our Story was invited to participate in “Welcoming Kansas City” to collaborate with and support groups ranging from Arabic communities to groups dedicated to supporting women who have been sexually abused or involved in human trafficking

It is especially important to provide accurate information as to how a photo will be used and obtain consent when working with refugees.

Sarah Kippen Wood, Former Executive Director of Their Story is Our Story (TSOS), shares how stories connect and lead to change in an interview with Darien Laird, our Director of External Media. Sarah gives us an inside look at how TSOS functions and shares how telling her story helped her fight a stage four cancer diagnosis.

Just as citizens in Europe and the U.K. have heroically supported displaced Ukrainians by opening up their homes or securing other housing, assisting with school enrollments, employment needs, and language learning, Americans now have the opportunity via the Welcome.us Sponsor Circles program to directly help newly arrived Ukrainians. The United States has committed to welcoming 100,000 Ukrainians temporarily for a period of two-years and the ability to apply for employment authorization in the U.S. as long as they have a U.S.-based sponsor to petition for them.

When I was in high school, I was fascinated by geography, and it struck me that there was a highway that I could hop on in my car and drive all the way down into South America. As an imaginative young girl growing up on the Texas-Mexico border, the idea of a road that could take me from my sleepy border town, Laredo, Texas, to the edge of the world in South America, left me awe struck. In high school I learned that this highway is called the Pan-American Highway.

Egette was born and raised in a refugee camp in Tanzania, Africa. In 2021, she graduated with a B.S. in psychology from George Mason University. In 2022, she received her MA in psychology with a focus in Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience, also from George Mason. She was recently featured in Forbes on World Mental Health Day. She founded Safe Haven Space, to empower and educate refugee families in the US about mental health and wellbeing.

Their Story is Our Story (TSOS) and By Women, For Women (BWFW) announce a partnership focused on collecting and sharing stories of displaced women.

Through the connections made by the TSOS Community Programs team, we were able to connect Yalda Royan with Julie Rose for this powerful episode, "When is War Justified?"