The Tipping Point: Sasha Chanoff '94 and RefugePoint
Sasha Chanoff ’94 entered a two-acre compound in the Democratic Republic of Congo and helped deliver the news to the 112 people sheltering inside: In a few days, they’d be able to escape the massacres raging beyond the compound’s 10-foot-high walls.
It was February 2000, and the Tutsis—the ethnic group recently targeted in the Rwandan genocide across the border—were facing new, unthinkable horrors. Chanoff’s boss at the United Nations International Organization for Migration (IOM), David Derthick, helped orchestrate a small handful of flights ferrying evacuees to refugee camps in Benin and Cameroon, where they’d await processing for resettlement to the United States. Congolese officials capriciously held back these 112 evacuees months earlier, but after negotiating one more flight, Derthick invited Chanoff, then a rookie IOM aid worker working across Africa, to join their extrication. Derthick also issued a warning: If those mercurial officials caught them trying to fly out additional passengers, it might mean no one returns at all.
But as Chanoff and his senior colleague Sheikha Ali registered passengers in the compound, they were alerted to a tent holding 32 unaccounted-for widows and orphans. Their male kin had been executed, and these survivors’ faces were etched by starvation and brutality. Ali saw what appeared to be a doll; when the doll’s eyes opened, she realized it was a nine-month-old, four-pound infant. With their moral compasses spinning, Ali and Chanoff argued all night. There could be dire consequences to bringing people who weren’t on the list, but what awaited them if they stayed behind? “I felt so out of my depth,” Chanoff says. “I’d never had any experience like this.”
Then Ali asked a simple, clarifying question: Are we humanitarians or are we not? With that, they contacted Derthick, persuaded him out of his initial reluctance, and figured out a plan, gingerly securing officials’ approval and amending the flight manifest to accommodate 32 extra passengers. They held their breaths through the conflict zone, all the way until the plane touched the runway in Cameroon. Months later, they all resettled in the United States, commencing a more tranquil second act to their lives.
“That gave me a different orientation around the work I was doing,” Chanoff says. “My eyes were suddenly open to people who were overlooked and forgotten.”
Looking back, that episode formed a foundation for RefugePoint, the Boston- and Kenya-based humanitarian organization Chanoff created in 2005 to help refugees who’ve fallen through the cracks of the humanitarian aid system find safety, stability, and long-term self-reliance. Beyond directly assisting more than 179,000 refugees in legally resettling to countries around the world, the organization has created programs that enable refugees to harness marketable skills and their inherent sense of agency to stand on their own, become pillars of their communities, and restore lives of dignity.
With war, persecution, and climate change coalescing into a humanitarian crisis that’s playing out across the planet—there were more than 122 million people displaced from their homes in 2024 according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)—that work is as urgent as ever. “We are facing a new reality that is different from our understanding of the world even 10 or 20 years ago, where refugees and forced displacement will be headline issues of our time,” says Chanoff, RefugePoint’s CEO. “The question is, how do you respond?”
“People Often Don’t Go Home for 20 Years”
After graduating from Wesleyan, Chanoff gravitated toward humanitarian work in part because of his family’s biography: His great-grandparents fled anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia at the turn of the 20th century. Working in Boston for the Jewish Vocational Services, meeting and learning the stories of refugees—from Bosnia, Iraq, Somalia, and elsewhere—further fueled his sense of purpose. “I was kind of driven to understand more deeply who refugees are,” he says, spurring him to join IOM and work across Africa in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Not long after that episode in the Congo, Chanoff came to Nairobi, Kenya. He worked as a cultural orientation trainer with IOM in the notorious Kakuma refugee camp and became acquainted with the civil war refugees known as the Lost Boys of Sudan—in particular, the 89 females neglected by that moniker and, as he soon discovered, the larger humanitarian system. Many had retreated to impoverished areas of Nairobi because they felt imperiled in Kakuma, but since humanitarian networks’ jurisdiction stopped at the camp’s boundaries, they were excluded from assistance. (Today, significantly more refugees reside in cities than camps, Chanoff notes.)
Later, while managing casework for people seeking resettlement, Chanoff noticed more blind spots in refugee response. Traditionally, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program makes available slots for thoroughly vetted refugees to resettle in the United States each year—125,000 slots in 2024. But with an overwhelming emphasis on food, tents, and other emergency aid, humanitarian groups had far fewer resources to vet and assist refugees seeking resettlement in the United States and elsewhere. “The humanitarian system is predicated on this idea that people will go home so you just need temporary emergency support,” Chanoff says, “... but people often don’t go home for 20 years or longer.” The upshot: Resettlement slots routinely go unused—some 250,000 just between 2000 and 2015—while refugees themselves remain without stable homes for years.
As a College of Letters major, Chanoff learned to question norms and think creatively—attributes he brought to bear in challenging the humanitarian sphere’s status quo. “I wanted to understand the system,” he says, “and that led to seeing the system is broken in many ways for the people it’s supposed to serve.”
A Global Effort
In 2005, Chanoff founded RefugePoint, a privately funded nongovernmental organization that collaborates with UN agencies, governments, and other humanitarian organizations to reach refugees across the globe—in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, across Africa and elsewhere. With many former refugees populating its staff and its board—an entity that includes Ali as well as Ahmed Badr ’20, director of the Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship at Wesleyan—the organization aims to build programs that center marginalized populations and give them a voice, partnering with the UNHCR and other humanitarian organizations to help refugees reach safety, and help them achieve long-term well-being.
To date, RefugePoint has trained more than 11,000 people working across 83 countries to identify the most vulnerable refugees—unaccompanied children, people from LGBTQIA+ communities, women fleeing gender-based violence, ordinary human beings facing all manner of desperation—and help them navigate legal pathways to resettlement. “We’ve built a whole global effort to identify and support refugees to resettle to countries around the world in close collaboration with many governments and the UN refugee agency,” Chanoff says. “But our leadership role has given us an opportunity to create new programs that help refugees legally migrate from one place to another.” Those include a project in Canada that matches skilled refugees and employers with hard-to-fill positions, particularly in the health care industry; a program that paired American sponsors with Afghan families fleeing the 2021 Taliban takeover; and an initiative aiming to reunite a million separated refugees with their families across the world by 2028.
After seeing refugees in Nairobi gain independence through different interventions—from access to subsidized health care and education to financial literacy workshops and entrepreneurial mentorship—helping refugees find self-sufficiency became fundamental to RefugePoint’s mission. “If you’re stuck, dependent on erratic [humanitarian] aid year after year and you’re not sure how much you’ll get, you’re forced into dependency,” Chanoff says. “What we’ve seen is, when refugees support themselves, they contribute to their communities.” In 2018, RefugePoint and the Women’s Refugee Commission launched the Self-Reliance Initiative, working with 350 partner organizations in more than 30 countries to provide holistic support to refugee families to achieve independence, helping refugees build stable lives where they are. Subsequently, RefugePoint created the Self-Reliance Index, a tool used by 65 agencies in 32 countries to measure refugee households’ progress across different dimensions—housing, employment, education, finances, and more—to calibrate programming to their individual needs and help them realize independence.
The programs, however, are eclipsed by what refugees have achieved through them. There’s Daniel, a South Sudanese refugee with a degree in health care management now working in continuing care in Nova Scotia while pursuing ambitions of becoming a doctor. There’s Pascascia, a refugee who fled conflict in Rwanda to find stability in Kenya, where RefugePoint offered counseling, food assistance, business training, and a small grant that’s enabled her to build a tailoring business to support her family. There’s Samira and Omer, a mother and son separated while fleeing the civil war in Sudan in 2016, who RefugePoint helped reunite in Vancouver, Canada, in 2023.
Unknown Futures
Today, refugees face even greater degrees of vulnerability. In the United States, President Trump—who previously restricted the number of refugee resettlement slots to a low of 11,000—paused the refugee resettlement program and suspended funding for refugee resettlement agencies. Across the world, widespread displacement has fueled xenophobia and reactionary political platforms. But without drastic changes in what drives displacement—drought, food shortages, human rights violations, natural disasters—there’s little reason to expect fewer refugees in the future; one estimate anticipates the number of displaced people to reach 1.2 billion by 2050.
With that stark reality in mind, Chanoff says RefugePoint will continue to work with the government wherever possible, whether on expanding labor mobility programs or emphasizing the importance of reuniting separated families, or bringing self-reliance opportunities to refugees around the world. “Our role is going to be to look for opportunities that match the U.S. government’s interests and that support refugees,” Chanoff says. “And some of those opportunities are very clearly evident.” Between 2005 and 2019, America’s refugees and asylees contributed nearly $124 billion more than was spent on them, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
For Chanoff, seeing refugees’ stories unfold over longer arcs has been a source of affirmation and inspiration. Over the last 25 years, the tunnel-vision intensity of that life-or-death experience in the Congo—which formed the basis of From Crisis to Calling: Finding Your Moral Center in the Toughest Decisions, the 2016 leadership book Chanoff co-authored with his father—has opened to a wider panorama. Chanoff has stayed in touch with the families who gathered in that compound as they’ve set down roots, cultivated community, and thrived when given a chance. One child from the compound reunited with his family and started a company that provides health care for the elderly in Arizona, Chanoff says. A few years ago, that four-pound infant whose future was once unimaginably bleak graduated college.
“Over and over again, you see people who come through the absolute worst experiences rebuild their lives and become inspiring people,” Chanoff says. “It gives you a sense that there’s nothing more important you can do with your life than supporting them.”
