June is World Refugee Month, and Karam is celebrating all the contributions, achievements, and stories of refugee communities through our Building Community Together campaign. We know there is power in the community. We know that feeling a sense of community increases one’s quality of life, health, happiness, and longevity. We know that the community has the power to change lives and outcomes, overcome obstacles, and solve global problems.

But how do we build community?

Refugees are taken away from their home communities, families, friends, and neighbors — everything that they know and that gives them comfort. They then embark on an often life-threatening journey to a host country. Some don’t make it, and others barely do. They are then expected to integrate into their new communities. To learn the language, customs, currency, job market, educational system, healthcare process, and more, all while dealing with the trauma of their displacement.

We witnessed this in the film Peace By Chocolate, the true story of a Syrian refugee family settling in Canada, and rebuilding their lives through a chocolate factory. The process is not easy, but it is one steeped in community and connection.

The expectations are high for refugees in their host countries. They must buy clothes to fit in, drop the traditions that don’t match their neighbors’ and learn the language of their host country. In short, we’re asking them to abandon their core values — their identities — because they don’t match our own. In actuality, none of us are the same, even if we look and dress the same. Our power comes from our differences and being able to show up as our wholly unique and beautiful selves.

So, I now want to ask you, what if we worked with refugee communities? What if we instead built a community together?

This expectation could seem absurd given the rhetoric we hear about refugee resettlement. But we’ve seen it happen in the most wonderful ways. We read stories in the local papers about meals shared between community members, problems solved by people joining together, and the powerful contributions (like chocolate!) refugees bring to their communities.

So, why don’t we set expectations for the host community? This could pave a new and powerful way forward. If host communities were expected to offer a warm welcome, social services, language-learning resources, and compassion; if they were expected to learn the refugees’ customs and traditions and to appreciate their uniqueness; and if they were expected to treat refugees with the same dignity they do for citizens, wouldn’t that look a little bit more like the world we all want to live in?

The responsibility should be on all of us to build a shared community. We will only benefit and grow stronger from it. There is only love and connection to gain from expecting ourselves to step up for the refugees in our communities. So, this month and every month, we hope you’ll challenge your beliefs about refugee communities and ask yourself what you can do for them. Who knows, maybe it will result in something as delicious as chocolate.