RefCoord deployments are determined by PRM priorities and are in countries throughout the world based on the needs of refugee emergencies or refugee resettlement. Not every major situation of statelessness has a RefCoord at the Embassy. In these cases, a Political Officer, typically the Human Rights Officer, at the Embassy is usually assigned the humanitarian assistance portfolio. The RefCoord is dedicated PRM staff, which carries advantages of a direct relationship with PRM Washington. In Nepal, the RefCoord Assistant reported to the Global Strategy Officer who was following closely the geopolitics of the Tibet situation and statelessness portfolio. In the Dominican Republic, where there is no RefCoord, the role was assigned to the Human Rights Officer who helped ensure engagement on statelessness by the rest of the Embassy’s staff in the Political and Economic section, including higher-ranking Foreign Service Officers (FSOs) that had political clout with the Ambassador and regular engagements in high-level diplomatic meetings. Given their mandate, RefCoords’ ability to leverage political clout through high-level diplomatic engagement depends heavily on their relationship with the U.S. Ambassador, as explained in Box 9 by a high-level PRM staff member. A good suggestion from the RefCoord survey included: “PRM and [the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL)] collaborate to provide training to RefCoords and Human Rights Officers more broadly on statelessness issues, so a broader cohort of political officers know how to engage on this issue.” Box 10: RefCoord Statelessness Training “I’ve been in the foreign service for almost 18 years, and I can’t recall ever having this come up in any kind of training capacity, except for the PRM 101 course that I took for this position. And you know, I’ve worked in political sections, I’ve been a public affairs officer…. it does strike me. What I know about statelessness is actually from my graduate schoolwork.” Box 9: Advocating to the Ambassador “I think that RefCoords, on their own, don’t have the clout to bring about massive change. But if they have a good relationship with an ambassador, they could definitely be influential. I saw some Refugee Coordinators with very good relations with ambassadors.” Training. RefCoords reported understanding and awareness of statelessness issues, mainly through the orientation provided by PRM, learning on the job and through a college or university course (see example in Box 10). Once RefCoords were at their Embassy post, most used strategies to learn more about statelessness issues such as desk reviews, engaging with UNHCR, briefings and support from Washington and engaging with civil society. Field resources shared from PRM Washington included monitoring checklists on questions that RefCoords should ask when engaging on statelessness issues in the field. One RefCoord recognized the PRP Statelessness Focal Point as “amazing and absolutely responsive and helpful,” while also recognizing that statelessness is one of many things covered in the portfolio and felt that more resources were needed to adequately address statelessness from a Bureau perspective (see Box 11). RefCoords interviewed said they were interested in more support from PRM Washington, more regular briefings and online training courses. A few RefCoords suggested the need for a clearer work plan—one that was tied to the goals of the #IBelong Campaign, including objectives, and that could be developed further with other monitoring resources. They also suggested that the Statelessness Focal Point from PRP should travel and support the field more. A few RefCoords recognized the difficulty that PRM had in keeping a focus on the #IBelong Campaign, given the lack of priority of the U.S. administration to these issues. However, despite this perception, one of the RefCoords felt PRM had done a good job keeping statelessness on the agenda and felt hopeful that there would be more space to focus on the protection related issues in the future. Box 11: Resources at PRM Washington “The Bureau has a person who works on statelessness who is amazing and absolutely responsive and helpful… However, statelessness is one part of a lot of things that this person covers, and I can’t imagine having the ability to promote statelessness at the level we need without more resources at the Bureau. I don’t think that’d come as a surprise to anyone at the Bureau, but for such an important issue of 10 million potential stateless persons in the world, we certainly need a lot more resources.” Some RefCoords highlighted the desire to learn more about statelessness programming to engage and track advocacy efforts at the global and national level, to engage in discussions about statelessness and to tap into the global efforts to utilize these conversations with other actors. A majority of the RefCoords expressed 11