How to help
“A space for refugee women, run by refugee women, because there is a lot of single mamas who are refugees, so they can have fundraisers for diapers, support childcare, learn skills, use their own skills."
- Amara
We must address the long-term systemic barriers preventing resettled women, girls, and GNC individuals from stepping into their power, accessing their rights, and having control of decisions impacting their lives. This section provides recommendations for funders on investing in and supporting resettled women, girls, and GNC people. Addressing the persistent barriers they face in accessing programming and services is directly related to their ability to step into their power, access their rights, and use their voice in decisions impacting their lives. The four overarching recommendations below are the result of conversations with over 400 women and girls. These are further distilled into immediate actionable steps funders can take.
Invest in the ideas, programming, and leadership of resettled women, girls, and GNC people.
Review & Outreach
Review current funding portfolios to see where gaps are related to funding for resettled women, adolescent girls, and GNC people. Conduct proactive outreach to community based organizations led or co-lead by resettled women, girls, and GNC people in order to expand the pool of potential grantees and understand their programming landscape. Talk to resettled women, girls, and GNC people and fund programming they identify as strategic and necessary.
Create
Create a dedicated funding stream exclusively for organizations led or co-lead by resettled women, girls, and GNC people. Fund programming deemed strategic and necessary by resettled women and girls, and expand creative funding methods beyond the 501-c-3 to reach grassroots organizations where they are at and not where you need them to be.
Increase Funding
Increase overall funding to organizations led or co-led by resettled women, girls, and GNC people.
Centering the experiences, ideas, and leadership of resettled refugee and asylee women, girls, GNC people, and providing funding for a range of activities they prioritize is the most unequivocal way to ensure that programs and services meet their needs.
Recognize Gender-Related Barriers to Transform Giving
Fund
Fund costs related to child-care and elder care as women and adolescent girls hold responsibility for the bulk of caregiving in the home.
Provide
Provide options for transportation to ensure women and girls can fully participate.
Strategize
Strategize with resettled women and girls on ways to gain gatekeepers permission to participate in programming without backlash.
There are tangible gender related barriers that funders must consider when resourcing and maximizing women, girls’, and GNC people’s ability to participate. Women dedicate on average 3.2 times more hours per day than men to unpaid care work, translating into 201 working days over the course of a year for women compared to 63 working days for men. This unequal division of labor starts when girls and GNC people are young.
Create Equitable Access in Grantmaking
Provide
Provide grant applications in multiple languages. Provide information sessions and written materials in multiple languages where and when women, girls, and GNC people can access them.
Reduce
Reduce written portions of the grant application and allow submission of proposals in languages other than English and Spanish.
Ensure
Ensure the grant review team includes reviewers from the resettled community.
The grantmaking process, even in its most simplified form is complex, and for some, inaccessible. Yet, the tacit assumption is that all potential applicants are coming to the table with the same information or understanding of the process.
Prioritize Responses to Violence Against Women, Girls and GNC people.
Listen
Listen to what refugee women, girls, and GNC people want and need when it comes to violence response and prevention and how, and where they feel most safe accessing it.
Fund & Support
Fund community based response services designed and led by resettled women, girls, and GNC people. Fund transformative risk reduction and prevention programming co-designed by resettled women girls. Support the inclusion of unrestricted emergency survivor support funding in every grant.
Convene
Convene service providers and resettled women, girls, and GNC people to look critically at existing service provision models to identify more culturally relevant options.
Violence, including community and interpersonal, was mentioned in almost every listening session. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated interpersonal violence in the home with documented increases emerging throughout the US. This violence impacts every aspect of women, girls, and GNC lives and affects any and every outcome currently funded for them.
Building on the strength and determination that got them through their perilous journeys, service providers from all disciplines will continue to play a vital role in supporting resettled refugee and asylee women, girls and gender non-conforming people rebuild their lives in the U.S. Refugee and asylee women, girls, and gender non-conforming people are not a monolith, they come with vibrant cultural, ethnic, and gender identities. With that in mind, these recommendations will help reduce persistent barriers they face in accessing programming and services, support them in using their voice and leadership, and help ensure they live lives free of violence.
Invest and Increase Solidarity Spaces
Consult & Provide
Consult resettled refugee and asylee women, girls, and gender non-conforming people about where, when, and what activities they want to take place in solidarity spaces. Consultations should be held separately with women, adolescent girls, and GNC people. Provide childcare and transportation support to ensure meaningful participation, and ask about other gender related barriers to their participation.
Identify
Identify facilitators from different communities to lead or co-lead activities and conversations in the space.
Create & Organize
Create opportunities in the group for resettled refugees and asylees to suggest, plan, and lead activities on an ongoing basis. Organize semi-structured monthly meetings with rotating refugee/asylee facilitation or co-facilitation with opportunities for discussions, information sharing, and socializing.
When resettled refugee and asylee women, girls, and gender non-conforming people can hold space with eachother - magic happens. These spaces become a place of healing, hope, learning, and leadership; and powerful entry points for information exchange, referral pathways, service provision, and consulting, working with, and expanding their leadership. It is important that each group are able to hold their own spaces to speak freely about the issues impacting them.
Strategic and Creative Partnerships
Build Relationships & Listen
Build relationships with community based organizations led by resettled refugee and asylee women, girls, and gender non-conforming people. Spend time cultivating trust, understanding power dynamics, creating authentic partnerships with, and listening to priority short and long term needs and solutions of resettled refugee and asylee women, girls, and gender non-conforming people to prioritize potential partnerships.
Identify
Identify creative and non traditional partners, including public-private partnerships, that meet the strategic needs and solutions of resettled refugee and asylee women, girls, and gender non-conforming people.
Create
Create mobile service mechanisms allowing services to be brought directly to women, girls, and GNC people in places, and through methods and messaging they say are safest for them to access.
The complexity of needs expressed by resettled refugee and asylee women, girls, and gender non-conforming people requires new thinking about partnership and consortia. Dynamic partnerships with community based organizations led or co-lead by resettled refugee and asylee women, girls, gender non-conforming people are a key way to ensure needs and solutions are well understood and proposed programming is culturally relevant.
Invest in Organizational Changes
Create
Create and standardize a process for co-designing program ideas for funding opportunities.
Hire
Hire staff from the communities being served for both internal and external facing roles.
Institute
Institute an ongoing in-service training program for staff specifically focused on cultural competency.
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Photo & Quote Attributions
All names attributed to quotes have been changed to protect the safety of the speaker. The photographs that appear alongside quotes are not of the speaker.
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