Summaries of Nadia's and Anna's sessions for LOTE5

UnFailing the refugee care system in Armenia:
 
Armenia is the third European country with the biggest number of displaced people from Syria. We are accepting refugees but do not have a social system enabling the newcomers to integrate in our society. There is no organization which truly deals with all of the challenges Syrian Armenians are facing here. As a result, most of them get disappointed and do not stay in Armenia failing to find jobs, affordable housing, etc. Due to the current system, Armenia is missing the once in a lifetime opportunity to gain a huge human capital increase. Anna works for a social enterprise that employs strategies aimed at significantly improving the lives and well-being of the thousands of Syrian-Armenians impacted by the ravaging war in Syria. 
 
Anna's session at LOTE5 addresses the issues preventing the refugees to become self-sustainable in the long run and aims to find ways to improve the current social care system in Armenia. https://goo.gl/Z8wsMR
 

Coming together to unFail reception and integration of newcomers:

Many grassroots groups are facilitating the passage/stay of the new arrivals, by giving them practical information, access to medical assistance, legal aid, dorms/shelter, food, translators, the internet, etc.They're also creating and maintaining a line of communication with the local administrations and communities, facilitating the creation of better-targeted services and attempting to defuse unnecessary and potentially dangerous tensions among those citizens that see the newcomers as a threat.
 
Unfortunately, many well-meaning efforts employ charity-based approaches that position people currently in the asylum process as “weak” recipients of our benevolence rather than potential allies in tackling systemic crises. These narratives pigeonhole people now seeking asylum as costs to the system. They also risk fueling mechanisms of exclusion, ensuring the newcomers will never be treated as equals in our communities- with all the rights and responsibilities that this entails...
 
We need to change the narrative if we are to make use of the new opportunities offered by newcomers. From beneficiaries to trailblazers. 
 
Nadia's session aims to look at practical ways in which we can build sustainable futures together by helping to improve the existing initiatives, and where needed, create new ones. https://goo.gl/0o6Rai
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@Nadia hope this looks good to you. Good luck at the conference! xx

This was very helpful thank you!

So you saw the post I wrote summarising it, right?

We now have three really strong workshops around this theme, our ones above and the one Ezio is running on Collaborative Inclusion. So I will write a post called “How to unfail the refugee crisis | Three events you should not miss in February” with your summaries above plus one more for the Collaborative Inclusion sessions. In it I will have simple instructions for how to sign up similar to the ones I added to your session page (am doing the same for all the session pages). Can you have a look how you like it and add info that is missing?

<3

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Thanks for mentioning my session in the post and editing it! <3

I will be adding info to my session page soon!