Jacksonville native launches Tennessee refugee resettlement organization

Jacksonville native launches Tennessee refugee resettlement organization
Twenty-seven-year-old Katie Finn, co-founder of Tennessee Resettlement Aid, grew up in Jacksonville and recalls youthful days hanging out at Ortega’s Florida Yacht Club or visiting Stockton Park with friends. Photo courtesy of Katie Finn.

For Katie Finn, Jacksonville is home. She grew up on the Westside, hung out at Ortega’s Stockton Park with her friends and at met people “from all walks of life” at the Florida Yacht Club. Her father, Mike Finn, has owned his own business — Finn’s Brass and Silver — in Lakeshore for more than 45 years.

In 2020, Katie Finn chose to leave Jacksonville. She left to further her education by obtaining a master’s degree from the University of Edinburgh. Ahead of her lay nothing but possibilities and the excitement of the unknown.

The people Katie Finn works with day in and day out in Nashville, Tenn. also left their homes behind. Yet their decision to leave was not made with optimism or excitement. They fled their homes to save their lives and the lives of their children. They came to a place where they knew nothing and no one. And after leaving everything they’ve ever known behind, they had to rely on strangers to help them rebuild their lives from less than scratch.

Fortunately, there are people like Katie Finn and her volunteers at Tennessee Resettlement Aid (TRA) ready and more than willing to help them back on their feet.

Before Finn co-founded TRA, she spent some time working with refugees at the border of Bosnia and Croatia in Winter 2021. Trapped outside official aid camps, these refugees were starving and freezing to death and had only teams of volunteers to rely on to help save their lives.

It was an eye-opening experience for the now-27-year-old, who up until then had never come face-to-face with a humanitarian crisis of that level — so much so that it prompted her to change the focus of her master’s thesis to study the Syrian refugee crisis in greater depth.

“The deeper I got down that rabbit hole, I was just haunted,” she said. “I just realized that all these people are here and they have traveled so far from the things that we here in the U.S. enjoy so freely: our freedom, our safety, security, opportunities for our kids, education. That doesn’t happen, that’s not accessible to many, many millions and we just don’t see that here because we have been generally protected by the Atlantic.”

After returning to spend Christmas with her mother in Nashville, Finn spent some time working for a resettlement agency.

She saw how quickly people, goods, services and aid could fall through the cracks of an already “deeply flawed” refugee resettlement system when it became overwhelmed with refugees flooding in from Afghanistan following the fall of Kabul in Aug. 2021.

“The system was already strained and when the Afghans came, it buckled and broke,” she said.

Eventually, Finn would leave that resettlement agency to launch her non-profit organization.

Katie Finn with man, two children, and bikes

After just seven months of existence, the organization has made it its mission to, according to its website, “fill the gaps in the current refugee resettlement system with direct aid to our Afghan allies and their families. We provide culturally-appropriate food, clothes and home-goods to new arrivals, as well as facilitate access to other critical services through partner organizations.”

To that end, Finn said TRA has provided “critical aid” to approximately 600 people or roughly 150 households. The TRA website breaks down its services even further: “400 Afghans receiving food weekly; 37 wifi installations; 60 bicycles provided; 95 families given home goods; and 12 washers and dryers hooked up.”

As Finn has helped these people and their families get back on their feet, she’s also witnessed her organization evolve in a way she wasn’t expecting. Some Afghan allies have, in turn, reached out to her to ask how they can help others just arriving in Nashville. Now, TRA also has a 10-man team of Afghan volunteers giving back to their community and the organization that first gave to them.

“That was something so important to me and deeply touching, but it also showed me something: Once you empower people, if you give them a hand up and you do it the right way, most of the time, it’s human nature to turn around and give the next person a hand,” she said.

Back here in Jacksonville, Finn’s father Mike is beyond proud of his daughter and the action she’s taken.

“As a lifelong business owner, I couldn’t be more delighted that her success is so quick,” he said. “It’s just mushrooming like it is, and that even though she’s not trained, her degree is not in business, she’s handling these very, very unusual problems…but by golly, she’s able to think this stuff through, see a problem, work it out and make everybody happy…I’m really proud of her.”

Finn co-founded TRA with Julie Pine and Saleem Tahiri. Tahiri came to Nashville as a refugee four years ago, Finn said, and has worked tirelessly to rebuild a life for himself and his wife and children.

Finn said, “[Saleem] is able to be an example to the people coming and saying, ‘Look I know it’s hard. I did it. You will be here soon too before you know it.’”

It’s been a while since Finn has returned to Jacksonville. She misses the beaches and is eager to see how her hometown has changed in the years she’s been gone. But she hasn’t forgotten the people who helped create the opportunities she has.

“I would not have had the opportunity to have an education, to live where I’ve lived, to go forth and be what I hope to be is a contributing member of society, if it weren’t for all of the patrons of my dad’s business over my entire lifetime,” she said. “They paid for my college through their business and they paid for me to have a nice life and food on the table through their business and their support of our local family business.”

By Michele Leivas
Resident Community News

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