Kristen Bloom knows what it’s like to start over. In the 20 years her husband has served in the Air Force, the couple has moved 10 times.

Their first assignment took them to Okinawa, Japan. Bloom, now 42, is originally from a small town in Massachusetts, and quickly realized how different life there was from what she knew back home.

Fortunately, she found comfort in the surrounding military community—people who were always willing to lend a helping hand and answer her many questions: How did you get your driver’s license here? Do you know a doctor who speaks English?

Fast-forward to late 2016: Bloom and her family had just relocated to Miami from rural Mississippi. Having recently decided to become a full-time stay-at-home mom, she began looking for ways to give back through volunteer work.

A friend told her about the Syrian Supper Club, a group that brings together recently arrived Syrian refugees to cook meals for fundraising events—helping them financially and socially as they adjust to their new lives.

Bloom then began volunteering as an English tutor for a Syrian family. Although she didn’t speak Arabic, her background teaching English in Japan and at Mississippi State University gave her the tools she needed to help.

Having experienced what it’s like to live in an unfamiliar place herself, Bloom quickly realized just how much support refugees need—and how little they often receive. Upon arrival, refugees receive only 90 days of federal support.

Her first English session with the family didn’t include a single language lesson. Instead, it turned into three hours of questions, a pile of mail they couldn’t understand, and concerns about healthcare—especially since the mother was pregnant.

“They have nobody to reach out to,” Bloom said. “They have no support network. And me, every single time I move, I have this big support network that can support me.”

This realization led Bloom to start Refugee Assistance Alliance in 2017, whose mission is to “help the most vulnerable refugees in South Florida with the vital support services needed to survive and thrive in their new communities.”

The non-profit provides refugees with English language education, employment opportunities and emotional support.

“I quickly realized that, yes, the families needed to learn English, but more than anything, I really felt like they needed a friend or a neighbor or somebody who could just help them figure life out here,” Bloom said.

Built on volunteer work

The first volunteers came through Facebook posts asking for help. Today, Refugee Assistance Alliance has a staff of 12, with more than 100 active volunteers and around 200 refugee clients. Volunteers are paired with a family and check in at least once a week and stay closely involved in helping families meet their needs, like helping them get to the library or fill out applications for government assistance.

“It really is a community,” said Romona Allen, the Client Services Lead at the organization, who started as a volunteer in 2018. “We work with them on a personal level, trying to figure out where they are. We build friendships.”

Allen now oversees client intake and employment support, helping refugees find jobs and navigate cultural and language barriers. Her work also includes connecting children with tutoring and mentorship opportunities to ease their transition into U.S. schools.

One of their first clients was Rajaa Zewanah,40, who Bloom met at the Syrian Supper Club.

Before the war, Zewanah lived a peaceful life in Homs, Syria, with her husband and two small children in a home they had built themselves. That peace shattered in 2011 when the civil war reached their city. By the following year, they fled to Damascus—but the bombing followed them there too. Eventually, they decided to walk to the Jordanian border, their youngest child, just three years old, walking beside them.

“I was so scared,” Zewanah said, recalling how they feared being shot at any moment.

Later, she learned their home in Homs had been seized by a militia and everything was stolen.

In Jordan, the family stayed in a UN refugee camp before renting a small apartment in Amman. Work was scarce, but after three years, the UN called with an opportunity to resettle in the United States. After multiple interviews, background checks, and medical exams, they arrived in South Florida in June 2016.

Refugees have little say in where they’re placed, and when Zewanah learned they’d be moving to Miami, she was excited—her only reference point being what she’d seen on TV. Reality was harder. Their first apartment in Florida City felt unsafe due to street crime. They later moved to North Miami Beach, where they still live, and her husband now works steadily in construction.

After Bloom founded the organization, volunteers began visiting Zewanah weekly, helping her earn a certificate in early childhood education. She went on to complete an Associate of Arts degree at Miami Dade College and plans to pursue a bachelor’s degree in social work.

Although English was the most challenging aspect of her transition, Zewanah eventually became fluent enough to volunteer with RAA herself and later joined the organization part-time as a client coordinator.

Hardship and humanity

While the refugee assistance program started as a response to the Syrian refugee crisis, it quickly grew to serve people coming from South and Central America.

Leorelis Tovar, 40, fled Caracas, Venezuela, to Colombia after political and economic turmoil made it impossible to build a future there, and after five years in Colombia, she realized life had become just as dangerous and uncertain. “This is no longer the place for us,” she remembers thinking when she couldn’t find medicine for her child.

Tovar applied for asylum and arrived in Miami in June 2024. She first stayed with an adoptive family she knew from Venezuela, but the relationship quickly soured and she had to move out. Her case with a resettlement agency closed and she spent two weeks living in the Lotus House shelter with her son. “Those two weeks are something I’ll never forget,” she said.

Lotus House offered food, therapy and stability—and soon after, she was connected to RAA. The group helped her rebuild her life, providing rental support, clothing, household items and emotional care. Volunteers even accompanied her to meetings at her son’s school, where Ángel, who is on the autism spectrum, now receives music, art and occupational therapy. Tovar was eventually stable enough that she could take on freelance design projects.

“It’s not easy to leave the country you love,” she says. “But if you want to move forward, you have to look for better opportunities. Here, I’ve found a lot of human warmth.”

Bloom said that it is hard for the organization to see negative rhetoric around refugees, as she has found them to be incredibly giving, hard-working people who go through rigorous vetting.

“We want them to feel this is their new home, excited, and feel welcome here. And it’s really sad to see that so many people are feeling fearful right now,” Bloom said.

Rokhan Sahel Niazi, 32, a former U.S. Army interpreter from Jalalabad, Afghanistan, fled with his wife and five young children after the Taliban takeover in 2021. Educated in English literature at Nangarhar University, he had worked alongside U.S. Marines, Air Force, and State Department teams before being evacuated through the chaos at Kabul airport with help from an American lieutenant and a group of Marines.

After brief stays in Philadelphia and at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, the family was resettled in Miami—a placement chosen for them. Despite the turmoil, Niazi adapted quickly, using his English to help other Afghan refugees learn the language in their hotel soon after arrival.

He later connected with the RAA, which provided job training, English and computer classes, and financial aid for essentials like transportation and a dryer. His wife now speaks fluent English, and Niazi works in customer service.

“When you say refugee,” he said, “It means hardship, stress, depression—it’s really challenging. We should always help and check on them to see what they need.”

Editor’s note: This story is part of the Miami Herald Giving Section that highlights local nonprofit organizations in the community. This story was originally published October 18, 2025 at 4:30 AM.

Charmaine Rice was a bright-eyed, recent Wright State University graduate when she realized helping others along their professional trajectory would be a fitting career path for herself.

“I was sitting in a six-week management training course at Ohio Savings Bank, and there was this woman who was facilitating that training,” Rice recalled. “We were not being spoon-fed information for eight hours a day. Instead, we were doing case studies and slowly building up our knowledge to the point where we could be confident that, even if we didn’t know the answer, we could find an answer. … It astounded me. I just appreciated being able to support people with feeling more comfortable that they have the skills and abilities to do their job effectively.”

Today, Rice leads a 12-person team responsible for overseeing the learning and development of AmTrust Financial Services’ nearly 8,000 employees. She was hired initially in 2020 to oversee diversity and inclusion for the global insurance company but “kept sticking” her nose into learning and development while championing cultural competence.

“For many of us, the workplace is the first time we are in an environment with folks who are very different than ourselves, communicate differently, have different observances, different values, different world views,” she said. “So, part of learning to work and be successful at your job can be less about the technical skill and more about the relational skills.”

Rice spent most of her elementary years at a U.S. Air Force base in Germany where her father was stationed, though a brief move to to the Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, exposed the sixth-grader to racism from her classmates.

Rice said the family returned to Germany 18 months later, where they lived until she was 16 and a final reassignment landed her father at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton.

At AmTrust, Rice is proud of the work she’s done “to create a culture that really amplifies employees as individuals, as well as part of the community.” Under her watch, the company has launched an executive diversity council, seven different “employee networks,” including groups focused on abilities, families, military service and multiculturalism, and an internal career development tool that helps employees personalize their professional paths.

“Of course, I can’t take credit for these things alone,” she said. “I have an amazing team.”

She puts her development skills to work outside of the office, as well, from her longtime partnership with the nonprofit Heart to Heart organization in Akron to the 2019 establishment of Cleveland-based Rekindle Fellowship, which she co-founded with Matt Fieldman.

Rekindle is a program that brings leaders from the Black and Jewish communities together for meaningful dialogue and collaborative action. With 116 graduates to date, the program is expanding to Akron this summer.

Fieldman said Rice’s “superpower” is her ability “to get people to shed all those layers of identity and just connect as human beings.”

“We more leaders like Charmaine who can connect authentically person-to-person and create safe spaces to have real conversations,” he said.

A high incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is unfortunately one of the tolls that Israel’s wars have taken on both its military and civilian population. There are different types of PTSD, and each has to be addressed differently.

Understanding that vital need, Yuval Limon, 67, and Nir Lahav, 62, began to build a place to help heal military PTSD a year-and-a-half ago. They received 20 dunams (about five acres of land) that had been lying fallow from two families who had given 10 dunams each in the religious Moshav Chemed, near Ohr Yehuda, in central Israel. There, Limon and Lahav began building hothouses for agriculture, and facilities for group therapy to treat PTSD at three levels: physically, emotionally and socially. Sometimes army veterans are so traumatized by their experiences that the farm is the only place they’ll leave the house to go.

The initiative is called Ruca’s Farm, after Lahav’s mother, who came on aliyah from Argentina in the 1950s, and was one of the founding members of Kibbutz Gazit, in northern Israel. So Lahav is getting back to his roots, quite literally.

Ruca’s Farm has six greenhouses where vegetables are grown organically, as well as fields growing 200 fruit trees, and other crops like corn. The produce is then sold locally (farm to table), and helps support the initiative. It is also served for lunch to the participants and staff, and one of the religious social workers tithes it. The founders are also hoping to create a farmer’s market at the moshav. Everything is built by volunteers.

Research has demonstrated that treatment combining work in nature and agricultural cultivation can improve mood, reduce loneliness, increase physical functioning, raise the effectiveness of drug treatment, and contribute significantly to the future success of those suffering from the severe effects of PTSD.

Ruca’s Farm operates a unique and intensive treatment program for Israeli veterans —an eight-week course in groups of 10-15, which has proven to be successful. There are two types of groups; one composed of soldiers from previous Israeli wars, and a separate group for soldiers of the Israel-Hamas war.

Some of the participants who have come from the current war have witnessed horrible scenes that have affected them terribly. The brutal and bloodthirsty massacre and atrocities of Hamas on October 7 were in some ways more traumatic than the war itself.

The farm has about 50 volunteers, most of them older, who come to work once or twice a week. Many of them are academics and high-tech workers who are volunteering in their retirement years.

After their own army service, both Limon and Lahav had successful careers. Limon founded a famous chain of retail stores called HaMetayel that sells hiking and camping equipment, and Lahav worked for The Jewish Agency. Both were looking for something meaningful to do after their retirement, and they had met through various projects that each was involved in.

The participants of the Ruca’s Farm program are chosen in cooperation with the Rehabilitation Division of the Ministry of Defense. They work for an hour or two on the farm, have lunch, and then do group therapy sessions for another two-and-a-half hours. The staff is of the highest caliber and are remunerated by the donations made to the farm.

Ruca’s Farm is under the guidance of therapists and researchers who are leaders in the field of treatment of PTSD. One of the ranch’s psychologists, Ofer Chai was a medic in the first Lebanon War, in which he lost one of his eyes. He was awarded the Medal of Valor and decided to dedicate his life to psychology.

All of the participants are military, and although most are men, some are women. They encountered scenes they couldn’t have imagined in their worst nightmares. Sometimes, a post-service soldier will not display signs of psychological stress, but then something will act as a trigger, even long after the event.

Both Limon and Lahav stress that they want the people who come to the farm for rehabilitation to feel at home. They are expending much effort, planning and money in building a kitchen, a meeting room and other venues that will give the feeling of home and safety. Right now they are meeting in temporary buildings.

The farm is a work in progress and new things are being added all the time. They are also committed to the highest standard of agricultural high-tech innovation for organic and biological farming. They have also recently started an apiary with a few hives for the production of honey.

“We feel that we owe these people a lot. The trauma they experienced compromises their functioning and we want to help them find peace here so they can return to a normal life. We recognize the Divine Providence we have been privy to,” said Limon. “It isn’t a coincidence that Nir and I met.” He and Lahav want to expand their work, and not just meet the immediate need due to the war. “We’re only just beginning,” they said.

The waves were a bit strong and the breeze still chilly, on the official opening day of the Shirat HaYam gender-segregated beach in Bat Yam, Israel, last week as Waves of Hope began the first lesson of its therapeutic surfing course for a new group of at-risk girls from the Haredi community.

Exhilarated from her first foray into the sea with a surfboard, Elisheva David, 17, from the mainly Haredi city of Elad, was still wearing a wetsuit while a few of the other girls had already changed into their ankle-length skirts and long-sleeved shirts.

“I was afraid I would be cold, and that I would get water in my eyes, or that I would be stiff afterwards,” said David, who had come to the course for the first time at the suggestion of Elad’s educational and youth counselor, Odelia Levi. “It was freezing, but I am proud of myself. I for sure will come back next week.”

For Eliyahu Ben Zion, founder and director of the nonprofit, those words make his efforts worthwhile.

A former Israeli surfing champion who became religious when he was 19, Ben Zion brought the sport of surfing into the world of religious at-risk youth to help change the course of their lives. His goal now, he said, is to “return them to the path of being human.”

While using sea sports as a tool to help treat such youth is a widely used therapeutic form of treatment worldwide, the Waves of Hope program specifically for at-risk religious youth is the only one of its kind in the world, said Ben Zion, 46. Every year the nonprofit provides classes to 1,500 at-risk youth. All participants must already know how to swim.

Ben Zion initiated the program that eventually grew into Waves of Hope in 2016 when the mayor of Elad approached him with the idea of using surfing to help a group of 10 at-risk boys. Knowing the surfing world from up close since he was 6, Ben Zion said he was initially hesitant to introduce it into the religious community. But then as he created the specially tailored therapeutic program for the disaffected youth who left school and the community, he saw it as a unique way of helping these young people.

“In a classroom setting they can be troublemakers, but when they come to the sea they are really afraid. They feel the danger so I take advantage of that and can keep them on a tight leash and they have set limits. They need limits to bring them to a place where they can surf,” he said.

The religious community is no different than the rest of the population in terms of the problems youth are struggling with, he said, whether their disengagement stems from a history of academic failure, abuse, family crisis or spiritual alienation. At-risk youth from observant Jewish families, who have stepped out of their social framework, can be especially vulnerable because they often face hostility and exclusion from their families and community who regard them as rebellious, defiant or as a disgrace.

“Most of these at-risk kids go to sleep at 3 a.m. and wake up at noon,” he said. “I make it a point that they have to come on time to the course at 10 a.m. This requires them to change habits.”

Sometimes he even arranges for individual lessons at 5 a.m. to help build their self-discipline.

Facing challenges in the sea also helps them learn how to cope with obstacles and problems in their daily lives, he said. A social worker is always present during the classes.

Levi noted that she is in contact with the girls whom she recommends for the surfing course through the welfare office of Elad. The course exposes the girls to a set of experiences usually unknown in the Haredi world, she said.

“It exposes them to different places. They discover within the sea that they can succeed. Through the sea they see there are good things in the world,” said Levi. “You see the joy they experience. All these experiences go with them and give them inner strength, the sense that ‘I did something, I succeeded.’ Even if they don’t succeed, they were here, they came to the course and feel that if they want to succeed, it is all a matter of practice and effort.”

As long as he rustles up enough funding, Ben Zion says he is able to open a 10-session course for a new group of 14 youth — separate for boys and girls. It costs NIS 25,000 ($6,600) to open a course, he said, and the nonprofit receives funds from religious municipalities as well as private donations. There is always a waiting list, he added.

Recently the Good People Fund provided Waves of Hope with a matching grant for a new class of girls from the southern towns of Ofakim and Netivot who have experienced war-related trauma from the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, and he is working to raise his end of the funding. It is the second year the fund has supported the program.

“Clearly we fund organizations, but we also focus on the founder, and that was really what drew us in,” said Naomi Eisenberger, executive director of the Good People Fund. “Our focus is on individuals who have found creative ways to solve problems. Using surfing is a very creative way of dealing with the issue of at-risk youth in the religious community. And Eliyahu’s path to doing this is itself a very interesting path, he was a champion surfer before he became religious and he is clearly very passionate and committed to this work as is his wife. He is charming and he is very committed to these kids. He represents for us individuals who have found creative ways to do tikkun olam with this pretty unusual program.”

For modesty reasons, Ben Zion does not normally oversee the classes for the girls, but his wife, Katty — who said that while all nine of their children have learned how to surf, she only does “a little surfing” — is present, working out of their cramped storage room/office to help the girls who might be hesitant to take the surfing plunge. On one recent morning, for instance, there had been a mini-crisis with David, and Katty had to negotiate with her to give the lesson a try.

“Afterwards she felt like she had succeeded, and like she was worth something,” Katty said.

Those who excel in the course are sent to Wingate Institute for sports excellence, for certification as surfing instructors; they can later be employed by Waves of Hope as instructors for their private classes, which are available to the general public — both religious and secular — and their summer camps, also for the general public. Revenues from both go to pay salaries for the instructors and also help fund the at-risk youth program. Any graduate of the program can also come to surf with Waves of Hope on Fridays when they are open.

Esther Malka Nusbacher, 21, from Beit Shemesh, has been teaching the course for the girls for four years. She first took surfing lessons as a private student in the summer camp. Ben Zion saw her potential, sent her to Wingate and then employed her as a counselor for the girls program.

“Just getting to the sea is for them freedom and they enjoy that and get into the water. It is just simply something else. You come, you surf and you feel like you belong to something. When they succeed you simply see their joy on their faces,” said Nusbacher. “They learn and they succeed. Here we are, the first lesson for these girls and they are present and laughing.”

Some of their students return to their yeshiva studies or to their midrasha, Ben Zion said, while others he helps get drafted into the IDF or start working. Graduates have also gotten married and started families of their own, said Ben Zion.

“They always stay in touch after the course,” said Ben Zion. “Today they stand as human beings.”