Monitoring of refugee resettlement

As the largest program within Church World Service (CWS), the Immigration and Refugee Program has resettled over 500,000 refugees in its 67-year history. While CWS has a solid history of monitoring and evaluating its network of refugee resettlement offices, its current system is largely limited to tracking compliance with government contracts. CWS enlisted a Capstone team to improve upon its existing monitoring and evaluation tools and design a system that not only measures compliance, but also supports effective program implementation, fosters organizational knowledge sharing, and provides opportunity for stakeholder input. Through targeted user interviews, surveys, and focus groups, the team was able to identify and map stakeholder needs and draft preliminary recommendations. The team, after shadowing resettlement site monitoring trips in Miami and Phoenix, also made revisions to the monitoring report format and several data gathering and analysis tools. The monitoring staff was trained using the new tools, which were then piloted and revised according to observational lessons.