A community leader from Somalia who fled his home, said that when he is doing service in the community, it’s like there is a cassette player going in his head. He relives when his group was attacked by the enemy. His family was made to watch as his sister was raped repeatedly.

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“These are the people we see working in grocery stores or working in gas stations that are really to me, heroes, and we pass by them without a thought of what they might have been through or what they’ve overcome,” Amy Harmer, the Executive Director of the Utah Refugee Connection, said.

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Harmer hopes to help change public perception about refugees through encouraging people to learn about refugees' lives and cultures and connecting volunteers to meaningful service opportunities. 

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“My goal is to be an advocate for those kind of people and help the community understand why they need to be here, why it’s helpful for them to be here, and what they’ve overcome. I get to see public perception change as they become more aware of what a refugee is and what they’ve been through.”

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Harmer has realized that when people in the community listen to refugee’s stories and attend events where they can socialize with them, they begin to see them not only as people who need help but as people they can learn from.

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She smiles while telling about how she sometimes on Saturdays visits with women from Burundi who get together as a community to dance.

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“I’m like, why can’t American women just get up and dance like that?” Harmer said. “They don’t have a playlist. It’s not choreographed. They just get together and I see these women go from being kind of sad, reserved, or struggling to dancing and just being totally happy.”

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She also encourages people to get outside of their comfort zones and go find the refugees and attend those events which will help them connect to refugees.

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“Especially as Mormons in this LDS community, we want to do service in our cultural hall, projects that we can do really fast that have highimpact-drop it off and be done and feel good. Not that those projects aren’t good, but be willing to go to (events like) say World Refugee in July and watch the dancers.”

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Harmer helps connect volunteers with the needs of refugees through working with several frontline service organizations in Utah.

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Organizations will contact her about specific needs that must be filled and she finds volunteers to help fill in. For example, when The Refugee Education Initiative brought a group of refugee students to Washington D.C., their tuition was already paid for. However, the students didn’t have any spending money for the trip. Harmer worked with the community to raise money to ensure that the students had an enjoyable time.

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“Something that’s interesting to me is that in the media there is this projection, and especially since this presidential change, there’s a lot of people that feel entitled and are a lot more vocal about being negative about refugees. It’s been heartbreaking to see what that does to refugees. There’s a lot of refugee women who now don’t feel quite as safe.”

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Harmer says a transformation occurs when volunteers, especially women, who may be feeling down on themselves as a result of social media, reach out and participate in service to refugees.

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“They come and interact or do service with refugees and all of a sudden they’re like I have purpose and I am more than just what I look like or what my house looks like or what my social media looks like. I am someone who can make a difference in someone’s life.” Harmer has experienced both volunteers and refugees become “more of what they are meant to be” as they become integrated in the community.

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Service has been a way of life for Harmer since she attended college at the University of Utah. She was in charge of large-scale service in the Latter-Day Saint Student Association.

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“My goal was to get college students engaged in service, and I love it! I mean, we were doing all different things in the community with different organizations and I got really passionate about service then,” she said.

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Over the years, Harmer participated in several service organizations with her family. She got connected with Utah Refugee Connection through helping with an organized Christmas celebration for refugees. She now works with the organization providing social media help while they are launching a new app.

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“It gave me a really good idea about what social media can do for good and how influencers can really change the dynamic of perception for people.”

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The app allows users to browse service opportunities in Utah, read articles about refugees, and learn which items they can donate.