Afghan Arrivals Influx Assessment Guides

OMB #: 0970-0531 Expiration Date:

Afghan Arrivals Influx Assessment

Affiliate Program Administration Interview Guide¹

Facilitator(s):

City, State:

Date:

Introduction Script

Thank you for agreeing to join this meeting. I’m [NAME] and this is my colleague [NAME], and we work in the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). ORR is conducting an Afghan Arrivals Influx Assessment in states that have been significantly impacted by Afghan evacuee arrivals. The first four states selected are California, Oklahoma, Texas, and Virginia. The assessment is not a monitoring review; instead, it is a comprehensive state-wide look at Afghan evacuee resettlement. ORR seeks to: (1) learn how ORR recipients and other stakeholders are meeting ORR-eligible Afghan evacuees’ needs and utilizing Afghan Supplemental Appropriations (ASA) Act funding; and (2) identify service gaps and promising practices. The purpose of this meeting is to understand how recent Afghan evacuee arrivals have impacted your agency program administration and implementation.

During this meeting, we encourage you to share openly about your experiences responding to the rapid and significant influx of Afghan evacuees. There are no right or wrong answers. Our goal is to gather information that can be used to make changes and improvements to ORR’s programs and services. The information your share with us today will help ORR identify training and technical assistance needs as well as service gaps and redundancies that can be addressed through program improvements. Please know that your name and other identifying information will not be included in any notes or reports. The reports are for internal planning and programmatic purposes and not for any kind of public dissemination, even if deidentified.

Our meeting will last about 90 minutes. Please know that your participation in this meeting is voluntary. You may choose to not answer any question and may stop participating in the meeting at any time.

I have one final point to make. We value the time and information you will share with us today and want to make sure we accurately include all the details. With your permission, we will audio record the session and take notes (written and/or on a laptop computer). Those notes will not include your name. The recording will serve as a back-up tool to ensure we include all your comments in as close to your words as possible. Once the project is complete, all recordings will be destroyed. During the discussion, if you would like to stop the recording while you make a particular comment, please let us know and we will do so.

Internal only - Facilitator Tips:

• This focus group is semi-structured and therefore the sequence of the questions might vary as well as the level of probing for information by the facilitator.

• The goal is to collect data on each topic area. Keep in mind that participant responses may cover multiple categories/data points. You may skip a question if you feel the data collection on that topic is sufficient and asking the question would be repetitive.

• Optional questions should be asked only if there is enough time to do so.

Participants:

Agency	Participant Name	Participant Position Title

Interview Questions:

1. Introductions

   1. To start, would you please tell me your name, name of your organization, and the ways in which you are involved in serving Afghan evacuees at your agency?

2. Client Needs

   1. What were the key challenges your agency encountered in responding to the influx of Afghan evacuees?

2. What are the underlying and unmet needs of the Afghan evacuees served by your agency?

   1. What resources/capacities are needed for your agency to address these underlying/unmet needs?

3. Organizational Capacity

   1. What adjustments did your organization make to strengthen the organizational capacity needed to respond to the rapid and significant influx of Afghan evacuees? (Probe administrative, structural, financial, and/or partnership changes.)

2. What types of training, resources, or other support has been provided to help your agency serve Afghan evacuees? (Probe who provided the training/resources.)

3. From your perspective, what kinds of training, resources, or support does your agency need to improve or maintain the capacity to effectively serve Afghan evacuees?

4. Use of Funds

   1. As you may be aware, your state received ORR Afghanistan Supplemental Appropriation (ASA) funding to support the resettlement of Afghan evacuees. In what ways have the ASA and other ORR funds been most instrumental in helping your agency resettle (or serve) this client population? (Note: Affiliates may not be aware of ASA funding or may call it by a different name. Interviewers may need to probe other ORR funding to learn whether any additional monies filtered down.)

5. Community Partnerships/Engagement

   1. What, if any, changes have you seen in the general community support for Afghan evacuees? (Note: For clarity, provide examples or probe increased cash and in-kind donations, volunteer engagement, requests to sponsor a family, political support, etc.)

2. How have you engaged the wider community in the resettlement of Afghan evacuees in your area?

6. Lessons Learned/Preparation for Future Arrivals

   1. What lessons learned or takeaways from your experience rapidly resettling Afghan evacuees do you think will inform how you serve new waves of refugees that will be arriving shortly and in numbers larger than previous years?

2. Have you implemented or seen any operational or service delivery practices that have been particularly effective and might be replicated or adapted by other organizations?

7. Ongoing Needs

   1. From your perspective, how well do ORR policy requirements facilitate (or hinder) your organization’s ability to effectively serve Afghan evacuees?

2. What, if anything, do you need from ORR?

1 PAPERWORK REDUCTION ACT OF 1995 (Pub. L. 104-13) STATEMENT OF PUBLIC BURDEN: Through this information collection, the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) is gathering information to inform the development and provision of targeted training and technical assistance aimed to enhance refugee resettlement program implementation and changes to ORR policies, programs, and services. Public reporting burden for this collection of information is estimated to average 1.5 hour per grantee, including the time for reviewing instructions, gathering and maintaining the data needed, and reviewing the collection of information. This is a voluntary collection of information. An agency may not conduct or sponsor, and a person is not required to respond to, a collection of information subject to the requirements of the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995, unless it displays a currently valid OMB control number. The OMB # is 0970-0531 and the expiration date is XX/XX/XXXX. If you have any comments on this collection of information, please contact [email protected].

AAIA Affiliate Program Administration Questionnaire Page 2 of 2