In the wake of a natural or human-caused crisis, families often lose their home, due to damage and destruction or through forced displacement. How do such affected people describe and understand their home? How is the notion of temporality reflected? How important is the “home” to affected family’s recovery? Does the context, diversity, gender, age, timing and legal status affect their perception of “home”? Are there any trigger moments/catalysts that instigate displaced families defining a place as “home”? And how does host community acceptance affect this? 

CRS has just launched our organizational strategy that will shape its work from now through 2030. Within the humanitarian sector, we hope to focus on “homes and communities,” rather than the house as the physical structure or food or water as commodities, but rather recognizing the varied and diverse needs that people have and the importance of treating humanitarian response in a holistic way. This video by CRS Haiti, Burkina Faso, USA and India on What does “home” mean to you? reveals why the concept of “home” is critical to ground our humanitarian programming. Ultimately, through this project, CRS seeks to understand: (1) when do displaced populations call a place “home,” (2) how to expedite this process of recovering a sense of “home,” and (3) what is the most effective form of external assistance to support this process.

We hope to gain this understanding by engaging diverse disciplinary perspectives such as anthropology, sociology, geographical economics, and architecture/design as we examine this question across different contexts from refugees in Uganda to internally displaced persons in the Philippines to migrants in Greece.