Amidst the volatile political landscape for new immigrants, a uniquely vibrant immigrant and refugee resettlement program, Hello Neighbor, stays focused on their mission to help newcomers find security and belonging. Why? In the words of Hello Neighbor’s founder and CEO, Sloane Davidson, because “Time and again, we were reminded that kindness is not a soft idea. It is a powerful force that stabilizes communities during moments of disruption and change.” 

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Sloane describes Pittsburgh as “a blue-collar place built by immigrants, with a strong sense of self and resistance to federal overreach.” The city has a long immigrant history. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Western and Eastern Europeans came in waves, bringing notable figures such as Scottish immigrant Andrew Carnegie with his booming steel mills. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans settled in Pittsburgh as part of the Great Migration north. In more recent history, an influx of Latino, South East Asian, Middle Eastern, African, and Afghani immigrants have enriched the city’s landscape, along with the student community driving the growth of tech and medical hubs such as Carnegie Mellon University. Pittsburgh sits at the meeting point of three rivers, a city of literal and figurative bridges that attempt to span the divides between new immigrants and the ongoing American dream.

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Sloane sees this work as part of the American legacy. She describes how before 1980 support for newcomers to the U.S. was largely run by “churches and neighbors helping neighbors.” Then President Carter’s bipartisan act formalized the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, moving much of the work into state agencies and nonprofits. She says this inadvertently removed the “people to people component” and put refugee support “behind an opaque door.” She chose to avoid naming the program after refugee or immigrant status because she feels that is limiting, when in reality "people are so much more than a refugee or immigrant. They're a mother, a father, a soccer player, a pharmacist, a neighbor." 

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With tears in their eyes, the family told us about the moment they opened the fridge. Luigi said, “And I see the fridge the first day was unbelievable. I mean, the food that they put in there, it make us eat plenty—at least 20 days [of food]. Speechless. Speechless because we suffer in Costa Rica for food to the point that we didn't know what to eat sometimes... 180 degrees change.” 

Drastic change with thousands of adjustments was a common theme we heard from Hello Neighbor clients acclimating to the U.S. When photographer Steve Jeter and I arrived at the Al Halabis’ house, we were greeted with smiles by the whole family and immediately offered beautiful homemade Syrian baked goods and cold drinks. Our favorite was what they call in Arabic Harissa, or wet cake, a dense, moist semolina cake drenched in a sweet orange blossom syrup. We chatted about how they’ve learned to find all the ingredients they can for their traditional recipes at the local markets. 

They told us their story of arrival. Their home in Syria was the once prosperous city of Homs, which was decimated during the war, causing the family to lose all their property. They fled first to Turkey, where they lived for 10 years before the father, Adnan, was stabbed in an attack (possibly targeting refugees), which left him near death and required multiple operations. This prompted a UN resettlement referral that placed them in Pittsburgh in the fall of 2024. Their daughter Hilal had to abandon her final year of medical school for the move and another daughter stayed behind with her Turkish husband. As refugees, they were surprised that Pittsburgh felt smaller and older than they anticipated. They always imagined that the U.S. was a place like New York City: giant with tons of wealth. 

They told us their story of arrival. Their home in Syria was the once prosperous city of Homs, which was decimated during the war, causing the family to lose all their property. They fled first to Turkey, where they lived for 10 years before the father, Adnan, was stabbed in an attack (possibly targeting refugees), which left him near death and required multiple operations. This prompted a UN resettlement referral that placed them in Pittsburgh in the fall of 2024. Their daughter Hilal had to abandon her final year of medical school for the move and another daughter stayed behind with her Turkish husband. As refugees, they were surprised that Pittsburgh felt smaller and older than they anticipated. They always imagined that the U.S. was a place like New York City: giant with tons of wealth. 

The transition was deeply distressing as the Al Halabis mourned all they lost. Hello Neighbor's Intensive Case Management program focused on combating their social isolation by connecting them with Pittsburgh's Syrian community. They helped them with everyday needs, such as language translation, enrolling their son in school, medical insurance, bank enrollment, Social Security, transit passes, scheduling doctor's appointments, navigating the hospital, and how to shop at the market. They also gave them official paperwork confirming their legal refugee status, so if stopped by ICE they have something to prove their legitimacy. 

The Al Halabis now face serious financial strain because recent policy changes cut food stamps for those without green cards, leaving them dependent on their older son Ibrahim’s income as a food delivery driver. Hilal now works as caretaker for her father and the other daughter is working to finish her degree in English. Their journey toward belonging has just begun. 

Helping with the Al Halabis’ journey is Aya Attal, Hello Neighbor’s Family Health Services Supervisor, who oversees Intensive Case Management. Her family fled Damascus in 2012, spending four years in Egypt before being resettled in Pittsburgh in 2016. Aya’s motivation is personal: she relied on translators and case managers herself as a teenager and wants to give clients the individualized support she once needed. She became a U.S. citizen after five years as a green card holder. Her central belief is that clients are "not just circumstances." She says, “We want them to regain confidence, independence, stability. We want them to thrive because they’re such great neighbors.” Aya explains, “The client’s journey does not end and begin with just resettlement… It’s a really long journey towards stability that people don’t seem to see or understand.” 

Aya also oversees the Smart Start Pregnancy Case Management Program. She says new immigrant women are often already going through one of the most dramatic transitions of their lives in pregnancy, and then when you add the many drastic cultural contrasts of the medical systems, it’s overwhelming. For example, car seats aren’t commonly used in many other nations. Many mothers are shocked to learn they must strap babies in, so Aya’s team explains the safety reasoning. In Syria, a woman typically has one or two ultrasounds, and is often surprised by the frequency of U.S. checkups. Pregnant women in the U.S. are mentored to understand and advocate for their own birth-plan and pain-management, choices that may be unfamiliar in their home culture. Aya has also received doula and bereavement training, so as to better accompany clients along challenging journeys. She told us a story of how one of her clients told her team, “This is not just my baby. This is your baby because you helped bring them to the world.”  

Martha Boward works with Aya at the Smart Start Program. She started volunteering for Hello Neighbor out of a desire to do what her family had taught her, to care for others in need. It was early 2022, at a time when Hello Neighbor was receiving a large influx of Afghan refugees and immigrants and needed volunteers to pick up luggage at the airport. 

“I was waiting in my car for them to tell me they were ready. And the radio was saying it was Holocaust Remembrance Day, which just made me want to cry."  Martha told us, when the group arrived "all they brought were these duffel bags that were maybe two or three feet long... That's all they had to come here." She recalls one father telling her that if he were sent back he would be killed. "It just struck me that… that was my first airport trip."

Now Martha volunteers to regularly help young immigrant mothers navigate pregnancy and birthing in the American system. The Smart Start Program at Hello Neighbor provides prenatal, postpartum, and baby-appointment support for refugee and immigrant mothers, such as transportation, interpretation, and cultural accompaniment. Martha frequently accompanies pregnant mothers and infants to appointments, sometimes staying through births. She wants refugee children to grow up in a kind world and to feel they belong. She explains that she was bullied as a child and she never wants any child to feel like that. 

With wide eyes she told the story of attending the birth of a baby girl named Hazel for an Afghan family she’d accompanied through prenatal visits. The hospital staff informally folded her into the birth team. “Then the doctor said to the dad, ‘Cut the cord,’ he was like, ‘Oh no.’ And the mom, she was like, ‘You, grandma!’” So she did as she was told. Another mother also began calling her “grandma” after many visits. “We cried together because they cannot go back. They’re not safe to go back… They don’t have the village. They need to make a new village.” 

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Zia Meyer, Coordinator of Community and Partner Services at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, described how Hello Neighbor trains her staff as part of their Little Neighbors Program. This partnership includes a multi-week library introduction series for refugee families with kids 0 - 5, and a 500-person systemwide training for library staff on cultural humility. The goal is to make libraries accessible to newcomer families and help staff sit comfortably with uncertainty in cross-cultural interactions.“It starts with being comfortable with what we don’t know. And that is really hard for library workers… sitting in the discomfort of ‘I’m unsure how to continue through this interaction.’”  

When we asked, Sloane described cultural humility as a curiosity about others’ cultures, traditions, and food—rather than probing for the worst experiences—this curiosity, she says, is “a powerful antidote to hate and isolation... What we really owe each other as a society, as a community, is a curiosity of each other.” 

This curiosity is also what undergirds the mentorship model at Hello Neighbor, designed as reciprocal “family friendship,” not top-down guidance. Pairs often stay close for years, Jennifer Walkup Hayes, the Director of Education and Community Empowerment says, “It’s not like ‘I’m up here and I’m telling you how to lead your life,’ but it’s more a family friendship. And it’s [...] reciprocal that each party is learning from the other and becoming real friends.” 

Joanne and Tim Goodall are an example of such volunteer mentors. Joanne is a retired nurse practitioner who now runs the donation warehouse at Hello Neighbor almost single-handedly. She organizes housing setups, "Smart Start" baby bags, and donated goods. She is motivated by a lifelong desire to "do for others," instilled by her parents (her family regularly took in neighborhood kids). Tim Goodall, also retired, now does medical appointment accompaniments—helping clients navigate intimidating hospital systems in English—as well as emergency preparedness planning. He drives a car with a bumper sticker of Fred Rogers’ face that says “Kindness is punk.” 

Tim is energized by the reciprocal enrichment he receives from his interactions with clients. He recalls being led into the NICU by an Afghan couple with limited English, after a postnatal appointment, to see their newborn twins—a gesture of trust that left him “flying high for days.” “The families are just so gracious for the most part, just considering… how odd and how strange this must be… how welcoming they are to you.” Tim says, “If somebody dropped me in Afghanistan and said, go lead your life—I don’t speak the language, I don’t know the culture… And that’s what people are dealing with.” 

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Jennifer is currently focused on emergency preparedness planning for clients. Even though refugees legally have status to be in the U.S., detainments have still happened to refugees in other cities, so Hello Neighbor is preparing clients for that possibility. "If something happened to you, who would you want to watch your kids?" Jennifer says almost universally the answer clients give is their Hello Neighbor mentor, not extended family or other contacts. A single mother listed her mentor as her emergency contact on her son’s passport application and as the person she’d trust to watch her children in a crisis. “That was just so striking to me that it's such a feeling of safety to have somebody you know you can call."  

Founder, Sloane Davidson wrestles with the tension of being “cheerleaders for America” while the country is in such a challenging time. She insists that Americans must “hold two truths.” She believes that the American dream is “still alive and well for many and is something worth pursuing,” while also recognizing that “there’s a lot in our country that’s challenging.” 

Sloane’s heart is with people “living in fear of being picked up, detained, illegally kidnapped, unfairly deported.” She rejects the framing of the current political reality as “it’s never been this bad,” noting that there have been examples of extreme cruelty in the past. However, she says the current administration’s “cruelty… goes far beyond policy” and produces a “persistent fear” that affects everyday acts like buying a birthday cake or waiting at a bus stop. She worries that the communities living in constant fear with a heightened sense of fight or flight will experience  serious physical and mental health ramifications.

In response, she emphasizes the need for “hyper-local” engagement. “I would encourage—if anyone’s feeling extremely frustrated by the national government—get involved in something as close to where you live as possible. Because that I think is the light that we see.” She finds hope in neighbors who keep donating and volunteering, and clients who keep showing up to office hours and mentoring. She sees this as evidence of belief in a better future even amid national turmoil. She described how a church organized 50 gift-wrapped food baskets on its own initiative, adding teddy bears for children. “I have hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of examples of true moments of connection that Hello Neighbor has helped create that no administration can take away from us.” 

Luigi Potoy, whose family fled Nicaragua when targeted by the regime for his father’s journalism, stumbled into aviation out of necessity. His family was struggling financially, and he needed a fast, affordable way to earn money to support his parents. Luigi already spoke Spanish, Mandarin, and some English, so flight attendant training was the practical option in neighboring Costa Rica. He aced every job test, knowing his family depended on him. The crisis career then became a passion. When the family's resettlement to the U.S. came through, he told himself the dream didn't have to end: "I told them once we arrived to the United States... I will look for any opportunity to go to aviation again. I love it. I don't care how much time it's going to take me... but in some way I'm going to make it." 

So he applied to American Airlines, starting at the bottom as a customer assistance representative working the self-service kiosks in 2024. Without a vehicle and living 30 miles from the airport, he slept at the airport up to six nights a week for over three months to make his 3 a.m. shifts. That year he was promoted to agent and focused on securing better housing for his parents. He said to them, "I don't want you to suffer more stairs... I don't care [about the cost], I will figure out how to pay it." He then discovered the Cadet Academy program. 

Luigi, describes how he nearly fell off the couch when he received the acceptance letter into the Cadet Academy, on track to become a captain within roughly seven years. He took the letter of acceptance to the Hello Neighbor office and showed the staff, who celebrated with him. He frames his journey in terms of his family legacy: "Thinking about background families, we never, never in life thought [...] someone of the family [could] make it like this." 

Like his painting, Luigi’s journey is certainly one of a phoenix rising from the ashes, and a reminder that we can hold two truths at once. The American dream is alive for many, and we also face many challenges. As Bittersweet, we are grateful for the persistent efforts and kindness of Hello Neighbor and those new neighbors who enrich our lives and nation with their stories and their hope.