Day: August 1, 2018

Refugee contractor, IRC, teams with TripAdvisor to give refugees tourist opportunities for free

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I guess this is going to be International Rescue Committee day at RRW (see previous post about filthy rich IRC closing an office in Kansas).

My first thought when I saw this story was that refugee resettlement sure is an industry!  And, my second thought was….

…There must be a lot of low income Americans and military vets who would like free boat tours of the Statue of Liberty and so forth.

The rich IRC gets richer and TripAdvisor gets brownie points (they think!) for their good deeds ‘Welcome Home’ (???) campaign!

From the New York Times:

From TripAdvisor, a Program to Help Refugees Get to Know the U.S.

In partnership with the International Rescue Committee, the Welcome Home initiative will offer tours and activities in New York City and Northern California for recently resettled refugees.

 

Trip Adviser
Interesting isn’t it: Trip Advisor has 3.61 million followers on Twitter, but could only generate 9 retweets in 17 hours for this tweet about their great refugee PR campaign.  Hmmm! Makes me realize I’m not doing so badly on Twitter after all.

TripAdvisor wants refugees to the United States to explore and get to know their new homeland, and the hospitality company’s yearlong Welcome Home campaign aims to do just that: launched last week, Welcome Home gives recently resettled refugees in New York City and parts of Northern California the opportunity to book a tour or activity of their choice through TripAdvisor Experiences, a category that offers travelers things to do in around 1,900 destinations globally.

The International Rescue Committee, a nongovernmental organization that provides services to displaced people globally, is TripAdvisor’s partner in Welcome Home and is responsible for reaching out to newly resettled refugees to tell them about the initiative.

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Refugee resettlement contractor, IRC, closed its office in Garden City, KS yesterday

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’ll be reporting the news below, but I first want to make my key points up front so that you don’t fall for the pity-party news story.

david-miliband-manahattan
“Some call it charity!”  Here is a charitable idea, some of those bringing in fat pay checks, like IRC CEO David Miliband, could send some of their boodle to staff in Kansas!

~The International Rescue Committee is ostensibly a private non-profit group and therefore the US State Department can’t dictate that it must close offices (supposedly they will be closing 3 of 28).

They might not be getting new refugees at the office in GC that was set up only 4 years ago at the heyday of Obama’s presidency, but they surely could pay for some staff and a small office to help those they already dropped off in the town whose major employer is Tyson Foods!

~The IRC is a financial giant as non-profits go.  From its 2016 Form 990 we know they had revenue that year of $736 million and that $494 million was provided to them by you—-the US taxpayers!

~Some of their top expenses were salaries ($244 million), grants and other assistance to foreign organizations, foreign governments, and foreign individuals ($296 million) and office expenses ($20 million).

Their headquarters are in Manhattan, New York (not Manhattan, KS). I mention this because I wonder: how much could a small office to aid struggling refugees cost in Garden City, KS? (You will see that the GC Telegram story is all about how refugees will be left in the lurch.)

 

~Salaries of top staff we have reported previously are here:

IRC fat cat salaries

 

The point I am making is that the IRC could very well have kept its Garden City office open even if new refugees (new paying clients) were not being sent there by the State Department. They could have continued to help the refugees they brought in during the first 4 years with other money from their ginormous pot of money.

But, instead, this news will be used as one more bit of media fodder to blast President Donald Trump.

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