I'll Never Get Over Watching That Plane Land

My name is Lanell Stedman. I am located between Carrington and Glenfield, North Dakota. I married a farmer. We’ve raised six kids. We’ve got 13 grandkids. I’ve always worked on a farm and stayed home. It’s a good life.

We started employing foreign labor over 20 years ago. 10 years ago, we began bringing Ukrainian men on the H2A visa. They are an excellent group of individuals. They’re hard working, and their values are pretty similar to ours. They fit right in, and they integrate really well into our communities.

Then they found themselves in a war. We had one employee that had gone home for his two to three months off. He called December 2021 and said he couldn’t return. He had cancer and needed treatments. We encouraged him to get his treatments and told him that when he was healthy and well, he’d always have a job with us. He was an outstanding individual and employee. He also introduced us to some of his friends, who still work here.

He called in February, and he wanted to send his wife and children because the war broke out. We encouraged him to go that week, get his treatments, get all his medical records, and then get him and his family out of Ukraine, and we would bring them to us.

They arrived on March 26, 2022. Two days later, he had an appointment to see a primary care physician to get referred to oncology. Two days after that, he met with the oncologist. The next week, he got his first chemo treatment. Unfortunately, the cancer had spread, and he passed away two months to the day of arriving, May 26, 2022. So, we helped care for his wife and children. We had a funeral, and then in August of 2022 her and the kids took him home to bury him and have a funeral and take care of things. In September, she got a hold of me, and she said, “It’s really bad. Could you bring us back?” So we brought her and the two kids back on the U4U. That was our first experience with the Uniting 4 Ukraine program.

After that, my husband and I said, “There’s got to be more we can do. We have got to help more people.” So that’s when I developed my business of consulting and staffing, and we started talking to different businesses in the area, matching them with people who had the skills that different organizations needed. And it just kind of snowballed from there.

I have connections with a lot of different Ukrainians, hundreds and hundreds. I would document things like family members, work, skills, education, English levels. And then I would take that information to businesses who were looking for employees with these skills, and we’d get them connected, and then we’d move forward with the U4U applications and get them in.

We help to provide some housing. Our guys stay on our property, but we also own houses in town, and if they weren’t occupied by our employees, then we would set them up and have it ready for these individuals to move into the day we picked them up at the airport.

I also try to get them rental assistance and all the benefits they qualify for to help get them on their feet. We utilize all the programs we can. I also have good connections with several of the apartment owners, where, if we needed housing, they worked with us. It all has worked out really well.

With the change in administration, many people are very very nervous. I know one couple we brought in. They went to work, they both became CNAs, and then they realized, about two months ago, their U4U is expiring the first of May. They had applied for TPS (Temporary Protected Status) about six months ago. Trump paused all that so they don’t have TPS. They don’t have work authorization. They didn’t know how to pay their bills. How do you do it when you don’t have a job? So that was a hard one to see.

They’re filling job positions. We have a lot of restaurants and businesses that are closed more than they want to be, because they can’t find employees. I talked to one restaurant hotel manager not long ago, and they said, you know, before they employed Ukrainians, the hotel staffing was lacking and less than stellar in their work ethic. He said with these Ukrainians working, it’s immaculate. It has just done a 360.

We have people working in nursing homes, dietary, housekeeping, CNAs, maintenance, construction, truck driving, welding, and office assistants. They’re filling any and all gaps. We are trying to find any other options to continue to bring in foreign labor. We need them because labor is scarce.

You can walk into town and you can talk to any employer, any business owner, anybody on the street that’s met them and they have nothing but praise and well wishes. People have helped the Ukrainians out a lot. They will donate, take them food, clothes, drop off furniture. So we have a really, really good community.

We don’t have any government funding. The EDC developed a grant program that sponsors/employers could apply for to help with the expenses to bring the U4U beneficiaries in, helping to pay for part of airline tickets, maybe a month of rent and the deposit, and other necessary things once they arrive.

The community just pulls together and helps with what’s needed. Some employers would even pay for their airline tickets. They say, “I’m getting an employee. I want to help them get here. I want to help them get settled.”

My community is better with refugees. Why wouldn’t it be? They’re coming in. They want a good life. They want a safe community. They want good jobs. They want to thrive, just like the rest of us.

I’ve got a big passion for rural North Dakota. Our towns are drying up, and we don’t want to see that. We want to see them grow, and employing refugees is an excellent way to grow communities.

Sometimes it feels like I’m too small, like I know I need to reach more people. But still, we just keep pushing forward.