This project is in collaboration with Dr. Kate Cooper at DePaul University and Dr. Yannick Atouba at University of Texas El Paso. The initial research idea was brewed during Kate’s and my Northwestern NNSI days in Evanston IL, triggered by the rising numbers of refugees back in 2016 and 2017. But quickly we noticed that the term “refugee crisis” keeps occurring in the news regularly. We have been studying it since. 

Since our Northwestern days, four papers have been published in various communication, nonprofit, business and refugee speciality journals. In one paper published at the Journal of Communication Management (Wang & Cooper, 2021), we analyzed Global 500 Fortunate Corporations’ CSR reports and examined the impacts of institutional and organizational factors on CSR programming to respond to the refugee crisis. We found that although the CSR reporting is institutionalized, there is a lack of coherent responses to specifically address refugee needs globally. The existing responses are mainly reactive to media.

In another paper published at Business + Society (Cooper & Wang, 2022), we adopted the concept of decoupling in analyzing what was said to happen and what actually happened in refugee serving CSR programs. In other words, the misalignment among CSR policy, activities and impacts. We then introduced a new typology that offers constitutive implications of CSR programs. 

Investigating the resilience and resistance of nonprofit organizations in response to the refugee crisis, a more recent publication at Nonprofit Policy Forum from our team (Cooper, Atouba, & Wang, 2024) demonstrated the critical role that nonprofits play in the absence of government leadership in addressing refugee needs in the U.S. With interview data from 34 nonprofit leaders, we suggest that absence of comprehensive federal policy and funding within the U.S. creates “intentional voids”, characterized by purposeful omission or absence of critical resources and contentious or hostile public debate. Within these voids, nonprofits seek instrumental and expressive support from government and may find comprehensive, unclaimed, symbolic, or zero support as a result.