Community Highlight: World Relief Durham
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World Relief Durham worker with children
Duke Chapel fosters connections with the wider Durham community by partnering in ministry with local churches and nonprofits, as well as nurturing relationships across social, cultural, and political divisions. This Community Highlight focuses on one of the Chapel’s community partners, the Durham branch of World Relief.
The Chapel supports World Relief in their mission to serve the most vulnerable around the world. Locally, World Relief Durham (WRD) works with immigrants, churches, and the community to help vulnerable immigrants thrive. They do this in three ways. First, they resettle people fleeing persecution and violence abroad to begin new lives of healing. Second, they provide immigration legal services to help families stay together in a rapidly changing immigration landscape in the United States. And third, they partner with local schools to fill in the gaps by providing vulnerable immigrant youth the academic and social support they need to navigate and flourish in their new community.
World Relief also works directly with the Chapel. WRD has hosted multiple Chapel PathWays Fellows and continues to be a placement option for future fellows. WRD has presented its work during Missions Moments in the Sunday morning worship service at Duke Chapel, and the Chapel has hosted benefit events to support WRD’s local refugee work such as We Can Mend the Sky by the Vocal Arts Ensemble of Durham.
Currently WRD’s youth program serves three Durham Public Schools thanks to churches, private donors, the United Way, the Triangle Community Foundation, and some contributions from the school system. WRD is pursuing ways to expand its immigrant youth services to more schools in Durham as well as its mental health services for immigrant youth in their own languages.