The Refugee and Immigrant Well-Being Project (RWP) is a community-based participatory research project designed to better understand resettlement stressors, prevent psychological distress, and promote mental health, well-being, and integration of refugees and other newcomers in the United States. For more than 20 years, RWP has engaged undergraduate students and newcomers in mutual learning and mobilization of community resources. Through these processes, newcomers’ cultures, experiences, and knowledge are valued and utilized in the promotion of their well-being and communities’ responsiveness to newcomers is also improved. RWP employs an ecological perspective that takes into account the multiple systems and contexts that affect newcomer well-being. By design, the program has the potential to incorporate the strengths and needs of refugees while addressing multiple aspects of the empowerment process to work towards social change.

RWP was first developed and implemented in partnership with Hmong refugees at Michigan State University in 2000. In 2006, RWP began implementation at the University of New Mexico with refugees from Liberia and the Great Lakes region of Africa (Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo and Rwanda). From 2009-2012, the RWP was adapted and implemented with refugees from Iraq. Following many years of longitudinal mixed method research, RWP received a grant from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities to conduct a randomized controlled trial with Afghan, Great Lakes African, Iraqi, and Syrian participants from 2013-2018. After generating conclusive quantitative and qualitative evidence of its effectiveness, the RWP is no longer a study and is now being led by refugee community leaders. However, we continue to work to advance the science of community-based social justice research through the Immigrant Well-being Project study to adapt the RWP model and implement it with Latinx immigrant families as a core research project of the Transdisciplinary Research Equity and Engagement (TREE) Center, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health at UNM from 2017-2022. Recently, the project has been renamed the Refugee and Immigrant Well-being Project . https://rwp.unm.edu/