The Cultural Orientation Resource (COR) Center provides important orientation resources for refugee newcomers and service providers throughout the United States and overseas. Housed at the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL), the COR Center combines CAL's linguistic expertise, the cross-cultural and technical knowledge of COR's many consultants, and the field experience of refugee service practitioners.

The COR Center's work builds on a long history in refugee resettlement at CAL that goes back to 1975, the dawn of modern-day refugee resettlement, when the U.S. admitted more than 130,000 Southeast Asian refugees after the sudden collapse of U.S. supported governments in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Responding quickly to the crisis, CAL joined a national effort to ease the adjustment of refugees to a country that they knew little about and that knew little about them. CAL provided local communities with practical, easy-to-understand information about the refugees—who they were as people, what they had experienced as refugees, and what they needed as newcomers.

Since that time, the nature of CAL's work in refugee resettlement has taken different forms, and its focus has shifted from a single area of the world— Southeast Asia—to virtually every region of the globe. Throughout these many changes, a basic purpose behind CAL's work has remained constant: to serve as a central resource on refugees and their resettlement needs.

Today, through the COR Center, CAL's efforts in refugee resettlement focus on a critical part of early services to refugee newcomers: cultural orientation. The COR Center's mission is to enable refugee service providers to conduct culturally and linguistically appropriate orientation training for refugee newcomers to the United States. The Center accomplishes its mission by

• informing overseas orientation trainers about resettlement developments and issues in the United States;
• informing U.S. resettlement staff about refugee orientation training overseas;
• developing materials about new refugee groups for U.S. service providers;
• developing orientation materials for refugees; and
• conducting trainings for both overseas refugee orientation trainers and U.S. refugee service providers.

The COR Center works closely with the various stakeholders involved in refugee resettlement: U.S. resettlement staff, overseas orientation trainers, former refugees, mainstream social service providers, employers, volunteers, teachers, members of charitable organizations, and church and community leaders.