The Origins of the Refugee Scholars in Ithaca Program: A Conversation with IWR Partner Ariela Asllani

“Education is a path to social mobility for refugees. It opens up possibilities.” 

So says Ariela Asllani about the initiative she founded last year, Refugee Scholars in Ithaca, in collaboration with Ithaca Welcomes Refugees (IWR).  

This statement feels like not only Ariela’s mission, but a reflection of her own story—a belief she lives and breathes as a first generation child of political asylees from Albania, a scholarship student at Cornell’s Brooks School of Public Policy (class of 2026), the 2024 winner of the Robinson-Appel Humanitarian Award from the Einhorn Center for Community Engagement, and a recent Clinton Global Initiative University recipient. 

Growing up, Ariela was acutely aware of the many gaps refugee and migrant families experience after they arrive in the United States and her family often needed to rely on religious and charitable organizations for help. Her background as the child of immigrants also inspired Ariela to look at the world around her with a global lens and sparked an interest in forced migration around the world. 

Children across the globe fleeing war, poverty, persecution, living in refugee camps often are not able to access any education at all, let alone think about attending higher education. Children arriving to the United States with these backgrounds have unique and nuanced needs, ranging from language barriers to lack of materials to significant gaps in their education to simply not being familiar with “how things work” here, that federal and local resettlement agencies, or the NGOs and community groups working on the ground, aren’t adequately resourced to provide. These children are, according to Ariela, a “lost generation.” 

“As of the end of 2023, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) reported that 117.3 million individuals had been displaced in the world due to conflict, persecution, violence, human-rights violations, or other disruptions,” Ariela cites. “Despite 39% of students having access to higher education globally, the proportion drops to a mere 7% for refugee students.” 

Ariela began researching the refugee experience in New York State. She became particularly interested in Ithaca and its history of supporting refugees. Despite its remote  location, “Ithaca has emerged as one of the major hubs in New York for incoming refugees,” Ariela notes. 

This research then brought her to the work of Ithaca Welcomes Refugees (IWR), and thus, an exciting partnership began. The objective of Refugee Scholars in Ithaca was to help address the “academic opportunity gap” for refugee students by supporting them in accessing higher education. 

Working with guidance from IWR and mentors at Cornell, Ariela secured funding from the Community Partnership Funding Board and the Serve in Place Fund to support seven refugee children attending Ithaca High School this past year. IWR staff identified participants from among families the organization had been supporting through their resettlement journey and distributed program supplies to them. The high school students received laptops; school supplies like backpacks, notebooks, pens, and graphing calculators; and SAT and ACT prep books. They were also given access to a series of training videos made by Ariela and hosted by IWR. These covered topics like how to email, getting involved in high school extracurricular activities, how to succeed in school, understanding the SATs/ACTs, and a guide to applying to college, including how to finance higher education, and community colleges as cost-effective possibilities. 

“I want to provide the support—the tools and confidence—I needed when I was younger,” Ariela states in the introductory video to the series. 

With additional funding from a Robinson-Appel Humanitarian Award, as well as a Greenhouse Scholars Flex Funding Grant, Refugee Scholars in Ithaca has secured enough funding to support up to seven more high school students this academic year. 

For Ariela, access to education is one of the most important pathways to refugee and migrant participation in society. She hopes to continue to work on these issues at a policy and advocacy level in the future, promoting the importance of education for those experiencing displacement and forced migration across the globe. Ariela passionately believes that access to education has to happen both locally and globally, through direct engagement at the community level and via legislative and policy changes at the state, national and international levels.

In all the work Ariela does, she remains acutely aware of everything her family has done to support her, and her overall goal in everything she does, beyond the need to “give back,” is to make her family proud. Ariela attributes her success and her commitment to helping others in large part to her family. 

“I am the descendant of Albanian freedom fighters, with my father’s bloodline having championed democracy under an oppressive, autocratic regime,” she says. “This upbringing has inherently instilled in me a profound moral obligation to advocate for refugees and those subjected to forced migration.”

Photograph by Emma Brown