United Youth is a mentoring program that facilitates mutually beneficial relationships between newly arrived, high school aged refugee students and role-model refugee students of the same background from their community.

The project is the result of the 2017 Global Innovation Challenge, which proposed the complex challenge of improving health and wellbeing for refugees in Buffalo. Our team came together with a strong belief that education can transform individual lives and the world; However, after researching the wide variety of resources already available in Buffalo, we came to the conclusion that another educational program would not suffice. Instead, we proposed the idea that social support network for new students from role-model students of college or vocational skill-training age, as a positive intervention for mental health, would help students overcome traumas, facilitate emplacement, and provide motivation to – increasing student’s efficacy and therefore, educational outcomes.