Refugee Student Mentor Program

Are you a UT student interested in becoming a mentor in 2024-2025?

Support refugee students in your community, engage your language skills, and gain valuable volunteering experience. 

Steps to become a mentor:

1. Fill out this survey

2. Attend a brief orientation at the start of each semester. We will contact you with further information about Spring 2025 orientations!

About RSMP

In spring 2015, Middle Eastern Studies (MES) began a collaboration with the Austin Independent School District (AISD) to not only provide an essential service to our community but to also provide volunteer opportunities for UT students with foreign language skills to serve as mentors to refugee students in AISD schools.

The idea for this collaboration came from MES faculty member Jonathan Kaplan, who saw an influx of refugee children in his daughter’s elementary school. What started as a small program in just one school quickly grew into a volunteer program with over 50 UT students working with Arabic, Persian and Pashto speaking students at 16 AISD schools, and we now serve students who speak many other languages. 

MES works with the AISD Refugee Support Office to assign volunteers to a specific school, and each student serves as a mentor to a small number of refugee students in that school for approximately 2-5 hours per week. MES also provides practical programmatic and language training to new student volunteers each semester. 

The program seeks to help refugee children adapt to their new lives in America and acclimate to their roles as students. While many of these schools have English as a Second Language (ESL) programs, these programs are not well-suited for teaching students who speak Arabic or other languages not long-established in the Austin area. The Refugee Student Mentor Program not only fills a need within the local community, but it allows our students to learn about the cultures and experiences of refugees who are starting their new lives in America.

We are grateful to our partners, the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, and the South Asia Institute, who help fund the Refugee Student Mentor Program. 

For more information about this program, media inquiries or general questions, please contact CMES Outreach.

Visit our giving page to learn more about giving to this or other MES programs.

Four UT students talk about their personal experiences mentoring refugee students in the Austin Independent School District