Welcoming communities are defined as a collective effort to create a place where every individual feels valued and included. DIME seeks to foster such communities on and off campus to ensure that complexity becomes a mutually beneficial proposition. 

We believe that every citizen is capable of supporting this cause. We have seen that universities and their communities are powerful agents in promoting local integration initiatives that benefit both host communities and refugee home countries. Our partner universities have up to 24,000 enrolled students, large staffs, a strong network of alumni, and numerous private and public sector partners. Incorporating this infrastructure and capacity into our program helps create systemic change: Strengthening civil society in Mexico and the Global South more broadly by building the capacity and responsiveness of new generations based on regional strengths, and improving life opportunities not only for refugee students of DIME but for displaced people in general.

Every year, millions of people are forced to flee their homes due to conflict, violence, and other vulnerable situations. Refugees’ lives are affected by displacement in a myriad of ways, but the damage can be irreparable when it comes to education. However, viewing refugees and other persons in mobility contexts as vulnerable, threatening, and in all other roles assigned to them prevents us from seeing them as people with abilities, multiple skills, and perspectives that can be a great asset to their peers and to host countries in general. 

Greater and meaningful participation of these heterogeneous populations within higher education in their host countries can offer existing university communities a broad range of cultural and professional knowledge and rich cultural capital representing various forms of knowledge, such as different languages, unique communication skills, and other valuable competencies. At DIME, we strongly believe that encouraging both professor-student and peer-to-peer learning that embraces this diversity is critical to creating a more globally competitive workforce in host countries. Only in this way can we hope to address the greatest global challenges in a sustainable and innovative way.