The transformative impact of refugee-led organisations on communities

After being forcibly displaced by the war in Syria, I found myself living as a refugee in Lebanon. At the time, the former conflict areas in the city of Tripoli in the north of Lebanon were considered red zones, and international non-governmental organisation staff were not permitted to deliver services there. The communities were in desperate need, and so a group of friends and I got together to start our own initiative in 2015 called the SHiFT Social Innovation Hub.

We were not just driven by the fact that international organisations could not reach Tripoli; we were also driven by our own poor treatment at the hands of staff from outside our communities providing services to us. In my own process of resettlement, which took over seven years, I was made to wait for hours in long lines in the sun before being taken in for humiliating, retraumatising hours-long interviews. We were identified by bar codes that were scanned at the entrance of the building as if we were supermarket items, and the security outside made us feel like criminals. In establishing our own initiatives, we were reclaiming power and ensuring that our fellow community members were treated with respect and dignity.

My friends and I started by rehabilitating a destroyed community centre in one of the former hotbeds of violence in Tripoli, a deserted neighbourhood with buildings ravaged by bombs and bullet holes. The programming grew rapidly from the needs of our community. We created safe spaces for children and teenagers to play and get psychosocial support, hosted women’s support groups for their mothers and other women in the community, and mobilised funding to support business owners by providing small grants and mentorship. Something remarkable happened as the number of programmes grew: people who left the neighbourhood started to come back. Our one-floor office became a flourishing seven-floor community centre with more than 10 different programmes for children, teenagers and adults. A deserted conflict zone became home to a bustling community. I also am proud to say that most of the staff working at the community centre today are people who at one time benefited from its services. Our organisation not only provided services, it revitalised a community. The effect of refugee-led organisations (RLOs) in a community is transformational, as community members take ownership of the solutions that change their lives and the lives of their children, parents, friends and neighbours.

The transformational impact of RLOs

My co-author and I believe firmly that solutions should come from the ground up, and that when community members lead and implement initiatives, they are ultimately more effective, sustainable, and accountable to the populations they serve. It is with this conviction that we decided to work at the Resourcing Refugee Leadership Initiative (RRLI), a coalition of six RLOs around the world dedicated to transferring power and resources to refugee-led organisations through four key strategies:

• unlocking funds for RLOs;
• strengthening RLOs through peer-to-peer programming that helps overcome context-specific barriers;
• advocating for the direct funding of RLOs and the inclusion of forcibly displaced people in decision-making and strategising processes;
• generating evidence on the importance and impact of RLOs.

As the promotion of refugee leadership becomes a hot topic among institutions of power in the refugee response sector, the same questions continue to be asked: are refugee-led organisations ready to receive funding? Do they have the ‘capacity’ needed to provide and scale services? What proof do we even have that RLOs are impactful? Studies have been commissioned and pilot programmes started with the aim of ‘testing’ whether refugee-led organisations are ready to serve their communities. At RRLI, though, both through our personal experience and the data we have collected from RLO partners, we can say with certainty that RLOs are already providing impactful, life-changing services, and that continued investment will only lead to greater transformation in communities of forcibly displaced people around the world.

We commissioned external evaluations of five of our coalition member RLOs to measure impact, and a metasynthesis to identify trends across the evaluations. The metasynthesis found that RLOs:

• provide accessible services, including to those who typically face significant access challenges;
• demonstrate high community connectedness, responsiveness, availability and cultural awareness;
• provide services that are holistic, mutually reinforcing, and highly responsive to community needs;
• offer both lifesaving support and life-changing solutions;
• demonstrate capacity to navigate and overcome legal, political and economic challenges.

RLOs are doing all of this and more – even with significant resource constraints – as described in a variety of emerging studies about RLO impact.

While much can be said about the impact of RLOs, we will highlight their transformational capacity – an aspect of RLOs that cannot be replicated by organisations that are not community-led. Often, refugees are painted as helpless victims waiting in long lines for aid provided by overburdened international organisations. In communities with thriving RLOs, refugees are leaders, community organisers, advocates, healthcare providers, teachers, and more. Refugee-led organisations do not just provide critical services: in and of themselves, they are life-changing solutions as they provide skills development for community members, create community knowledge, and serve as sustainable community institutions.

RLOs develop community skills

Refugee-led organisations transform their communities through the skills they build for staff, volunteers and programme participants who then utilise those skills in their daily lives to support their friends, families, neighbours and communities. Hiring community members is undoubtedly a form of community impact; for larger organisations, this can mean hundreds of jobs for community members. However, the impact goes beyond job creation. Through paid and volunteer roles, and even peer-led programming, community members hone skills ranging from conflict resolution to community organising to accounting that can benefit their communities beyond the specific services they provide through the RLO.

For example, Refugee and Asylum Seekers Information Centre (RAIC) in Indonesia provides a peer-led, community-based mental health programme known as COPE. This programme was created based on staff’s personal and professional knowledge of high rates of suicide, depression and anxiety among the community. COPE works on two levels: providing support for participants’ mental health and training participants to become community wellness facilitators. This programme strengthens the overall ability of the community to address mental health needs, including psychological first aid material that specifically helps participants support families and friends in crisis. Because these services are refugee-led, they are also available in a variety of languages spoken by the community and are led by fellow community members who understand the cultural sensitivity of different issues. Psychosocial services received by individuals can be life-changing for those individuals, but refugee-led services like COPE are invaluable in transforming whole communities’ approaches to mental health.

RLOs create knowledgeable communities

Beyond specific skills that RLOs teach, the act of establishing and running an organisation in a new country requires leaders, staff, volunteers and community members to learn to navigate difficult circumstances and processes in their new homes. When community members find their own solutions, as opposed to others finding ones on their behalf, they are able to own and implement these solutions for themselves, and they are more likely to be workable for other community members, creating a greater base of community knowledge.

Refugiados Unidos (RU) in Colombia had difficulties both renting an office and opening a bank account as Venezuelans – issues that not only affect organisational leaders, but all community members. Now that they have managed to find solutions to these issues, they can share lessons learned with other organisations, entrepreneurs and community leaders. RU has also developed a variety of strategies to hire community members despite a complicated legal environment. They are supporting other partners to do the same to ensure that Venezuelan applicants are not neglected due to difficulties with hiring.

The impetus to hire staff from refugee communities generally leads to creative solutions for community members who might otherwise have difficulty accessing work. In RRLI’s own Strengthening RLOs Partnership Program, RLOs share strategies and provide support on hiring community members in legally complicated environments. The lessons they learn from these processes can be shared with employers and workers alike to promote livelihoods within their communities.

RLOs provide sustainable community institutions

Finally, refugee-led organisations themselves create and sustain vibrant communities. Many of us have experience with models of international organisations that develop ‘exit strategies’ to leave communities, or perhaps close their doors due to a lack of funding, changing funding priorities, or even for security reasons. When these organisations leave, community members are left without services, sometimes in their most difficult moments. This was made very clear during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when international organisations and multilateral agencies such as the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) closed their doors and were unable to carry out services during a time when need was highest, while RLOs continued serving their communities.

Communities with thriving RLOs have support in spite of changing donor priorities, security situations and media attention. Though we know that funding enables RLOs to provide sustained and scaled services, refugee leaders serve their communities with or without funding, and regardless of changes in country context. In addition, the skills, networks and knowledge built by RLOs remain in the community and can be utilised informally, even in situations where formal organisations are unable to run full operations due to a lack of funding or other external emergencies such as government crackdowns.

The need for sustainable community institutions is also true in the ‘opposite’ situation – when a community is improving and an international organisation chooses to focus resources on an area that seems more in need. Again, in these cases, RLOs remain to serve those who are still in need, and to ensure that their communities not only survive, but also thrive and build on their successes.

Challenges to and recommendations for scaling impact for RLOs

Many challenges still remain for scaling impact for refugee-led organisations. RLOs still do not have access to sustainable funding as many funders have requirements that are difficult for RLOs to meet, such as formal registration or bank accounts, or effectively requiring English fluency through application materials only available in English (and difficult English with sector jargon at that).

As a funder, we at RRLI have minimised such barriers to accessing funding. Our own RLO-to-RLO Fund does not require registration or a bank account, and we have developed solutions for RLOs to safely receive funds if they do not have access to a bank account. We also permit organisations to submit materials in any language they prefer and provide interpretation as needed in meetings with grantee partners.

Even as leaders of refugee-led organisations, we still come up against challenges to ensure that processes are truly shifting power to communities and enabling the most impactful programming possible. We are always working to make our processes even more participatory to make sure that power is in the hands of communities to decide what is funded. We are also always in conversation with our grantee partners to make sure that grant-making and reporting processes are based on trust, and do not create undue burdens that take away from their ability to serve their communities (usually, such processes might prioritise organisations with experience in funding applications or with the resources to produce better written materials).

In order to support the impact of refugee-led organisations, we recommend that donors and other institutions that provide grants (such as multilateral agencies and international organisations) review their policies to see how they might prevent refugee-led organisations from securing funding. We are available to discuss any barriers organisations may have to directly funding RLOs, and can also offer our own refugee-led intermediary, the RLO-to-RLO Fund, for institutions that are not yet ready to directly fund RLOs. Refugees need to be at the forefront of the sector meant to serve their needs. Institutions of power must explore their own role in a sector that often puts white and/or non-refugee ‘experts’ in positions of power to make decisions about the lives of communities of people who have experienced forced displacement. Partnering with and sustainably funding refugee-led organisations is key to a larger transfer of power and resources to forcibly displaced communities that will enable them to build and sustain their own solutions.

Our own initiative has launched a campaign to urgently fundraise for sustainable, community-led grantmaking in 2024. You can support us here.

Hane Alrustm is Director of Programs at the Resourcing Refugee Leadership Initiative (RRLI).

Gabriella Kallas is the Director of Operations and Strategy at the RRLI.

Author for contact: Hane Alrustm, info@refugeeslead.org