Refugee-led community organizations (RCOs) play a crucial role within society, as amply demonstrated by numerous research studies. RCOs provide liaison support to newly arrived refugees:
- facilitating faster integration by providing basic information on procedures and daily life,
- offering language training and cultural orientation, support refugees who wish to contribute to lost societies, and generally help in the normalization process that turns a host community into a home,
- also promoting involvement with the broader community and see their role in uniting and strengthening the community, promoting its culture, faith and language, strengthening trust and creating an active and healthy community.
Refugees and RCOs
Many refugees want to establish different forms of organization, with different missions, but they face a number of barriers that often prevent the active implementation of strong and effective organizations. If Europe is to progress toward more inclusive, rights-respecting, and dignified laws and policies, both internally and externally, refugees must be elevated to the status of equal partners and activists through organized community organizations (formal or informal), and the role of Civil Protection Organizations (RCOs) must be identified as one of the key interlocutors between refugees and host communities.
The project
Themain objective of this project is therefore to see a marked improvement in the quality of refugees’ enjoyment of human rights and is based on the idea of supporting the active inclusion of marginalized, vulnerable or excluded communities. In this way, the project aims to strengthen the inclusion of refugees by supporting the empowerment of those who wish to play an active role in their communities and at the European level.
Through the project, community needs, strengths and trends will be identified and we will seek to produce a training package that addresses these challenges and provides advanced skills to overcome them. Part of our project will be a training program aimed at supporting the mobilization of refugees into organized and effective communities that are active in various areas, such as peer support, provision of information or other community-based services, advocacy with national government stakeholders to bring the voices of excluded groups to the attention of policy makers, involvement in public outreach, and direct dialogue with the communities that represent them.
Training kit for empowering refugee-led community organizations
This will be the Training Kit, our final product that will address the challenges refugees face in integrating effectively in host countries. The Training Kit will contain content aimed at RCOs who wish to be active at the national level, along with training content aimed at RCOs who wish to be active at the European level, and will then be publicly available and widely disseminated through partner networks.
Through a combination of community consultation, desk research, and synergy of transnational expertise, the project will build on an in-depth understanding of the needs and strengths of refugee organizations and refugee communities, seeking to fill gaps in skills and knowledge that prevent refugee organizations from being effective advocacy partners at the national and European levels.
For more information, visit the website.