The Solutions Lab has already made significant strides in assisting migrants. Current projects include Prof. Ramya Ramanath's project to study how forced migrants experience homelessness, Prof. Monica Reyes's project focused on rhetorical practices and how migrant volunteer contributions help them navigate systemic barriers while fostering resilience, and Prof. Jay Baglia's project will be working on a patient centered video series that will assist migrants navigate their healthcare.
Looking ahead to the 2025-26 cycle, the Solutions Lab continues to build on its foundational mission. It serves as a beacon of collaboration and innovation, creating solutions tailored to the unique needs and challenges of migrant communities.
Ramya Ramanath: Delineating Pathways into Homelessness Among Forced Migrants: Lessons and Recommendations from a Multi-Country Implementation Analysis
Ramya Ramanath is Associate Professor at DePaul University's School of Public Service where she chairs its International Public Service degree program. Her research projects, primarily in India, the US, and East Africa, draw on disciplinary perspectives in organizational behavior, urban sociology, planning, anthropology, and political science. Her resulting publications have focused on interorganizational and organization-community relations in affordable housing, resettlement and rehabilitation, capacity building, program evaluation and gender-responsive policy and practice.
Her project with the DMC Solutions Lab Delineating Pathways into Homelessness Among Forced Migrants: Lessons and Recommendations from a Multi-Country Implementation Analysis, involves working with the Ruff Institute for Global Homelessness. Cities are paradoxical entities, both the sites of refuge and homecoming for displaced migrants and yet they are the very spaces where those forcibly displaced face the risk of double displacement i.e., the loss of both a home and a homeland. Forced migrants face challenges in accessing shelter. This project, conducted in partnership with the Ruff Institute of Global Homelessness, will examine the policies and practices that precipitate (or preclude) homelessness from the perspective of service providers, both governmental and nongovernmental, working with forced migrants in multiple distinct cities across the globe. In doing so, it will inform policy and procedural change at a time when many cities are experiencing a mass influx of forcibly displaced migrants.
Mónica Reyes: Cultivating Community: Rhetorical Practices of Migrant Volunteers in Chicago
Mónica Reyes (PhD, Old Dominion University) is an assistant professor in the Writing, Rhetoric & Discourse Department at DePaul University. Her research focuses on cultural rhetorics and critical refugee studies, with particular attention to the intersections of rhetoric, storytelling, and migration. She is the author of Rhetoric and Storytelling within the U.S. Asylum Process (2024). Her work has appeared in Grassroots Activisms: Public Rhetorics in Localized Contexts (2024), Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing & Culture (2020), and Postcolonial Text (2019).
Dr. Reyes’ project, Cultivating Community: Rhetorical Practices of Migrant Volunteers in Chicago, partners with Nuevos Vecinos— a Chicago non-profit — to explore how migrant volunteers use volunteer work to create community, purpose, and belonging in the context of restricted access to work permits. This research focuses on the rhetorical practices of migrant volunteers and how their contributions help them navigate systemic barriers while fostering resilience.