Forging Opportunities for Refugees in America Inc NFP

Founded in 2018, FORA helps illiterate refugee children gain foundational education skills so that school becomes meaningful. Focusing on the critical skills of reading and math understanding, we provide two hours a day of customized, intensive core instruction (with a 2-to-1 or less student-tutor ratio) for more than 60 Rohingya, Afghan and Bhutanese refugee students (with 31,200 student-hours of tutoring a year) through High Dosage Tutoring (HDT) (see Nickow, Oreopoulos, & Quan, 2020; Mahnken, 2020). We are unaware of anyone else implementing this strategy with pre-literate refugees, a category of marginalized students for whom high-dosage tutoring is, because of FORA, proving extremely effective. Approached with a social-emotional-learning (SEL) lens, the skills and confidence students gain at FORA allow them to participate meaningfully in school, as well as in the community through our non-tutoring programs of robotics, Model UN, debate and trauma-aware storytelling.