Reimagining LSS-SW's Women's Leadership Program

My involvement with LSS-SW began back in September of 2022 when LSS-SW wanted to revive some of its client services. Among these services that required resuscitation were its Leadership Programs. For months, staff members under the Women's Empowerment Program at LSS-SW had been attempting to create a space where their refugee women clients could safely address their concerns and gain practical resources and skills for their needs. I explained my interest in incorporating my studies in trauma, social justice, and psychosocial services and that I would like to act as a resource for consulting on their programs and assisting in giving a series of presentations on stress mitigation and practicing positive mental health interventions.

It was brought to my attention that they were looking to revive their Refugee Women's Leadership Program and that they had a pre-exisiting curriculum to work from. It dealt with themes ranging from organization to mood regulation. At first glance, I could appreciate the organization and intention behind the creation of this program. However, as I looked in-depth at the curriculum, I started to notice aspects to the resources that perpetuate harmful assumptions about refugee women and their experiences. This curriculum, while meant to equip women with knowledge of practical skills in topics such as: communication, organizational skills, goal setting, and more, had perceivably condescending undertones. For example, one lesson in the program focused on “good vs. bad communication” and the interactive elements to the lesson plan included an activity where the participants had to identify differences between “angry” and “happy” facial expressions. The accompanying lesson was a provision of alternatives to negative communication; however, the images and the examples/alternatives were rather basic and elementary. Included below are pictures that I took from the curriculum binder which detailed these lessons. You might see how the images evoke a sense of infantilization and condescension through both the examples provided (advising adult women to prioritize their children instead of watching TV) and the resources that accompany it (using elementary-level examples to describe mood regulation).

Why did this change need to occur?

Refugees experience traumas even well beyond "resettlement". With this experience, partly as symptoms of disruptions in familiarity and belonging, are feelings of loneliness, loss, fear, and an overall sense of difficulty in resettlement (Nickerson et. al, 2014 [1]). These experiences are the imprints of trauma, where the impact of stressors can be exacerbated by a lack of support in post-traumatic environments (deVries, 1996 [2]). The consequences of such stressors coupled with a continued lack of support could include dissociation, difficulty expressing emotion, memory impairment, relational disturbances, neurophysiological changes, and other mental health issues (Goldsmith et. al, 2004 [3]). 

Humanitarian organizations, when implementing interventions, should approach services without infantilizing refugees. Part of this process requires the perspective of refugees themselves. Lau and Rodgers describe three attributes for competent refugee services: cultural awareness, cultural knowledge, and cultural skills (2021 [4]). Therefore, humanitarian services should incorporate those with such skills, such as lived experience, as service providers or designers in the process. Rather than perpetuating standards where the "Helper/helpee" dynamic runs rampant with irrelevant aid and imbalances of power, the WLDEP curriculum required a more grounded and integrated approach to assessing needs and distributing resources.

The issue of irrelevant and diminutive aid work can be perfectly exemplified through Yazan Al Saadi's comic (included below), "An INGO worker walks into a refugee camp" (2018 [5]). It depicts an aid worker teaching refugees in the camp how to use soap, of all things, which was keenly looked upon by the donors which financially supported the humanitarian work. Yazan Al Saadi describes this phenomena, “[Most types of humanitarian aid work directed towards refugees] usually concern themselves with providing the barest levels of aid, and rarely is that type of aid about refugees’ long-term self-sustainability or results in tangible social, economic, and political avenues for developing their own agency; in effect, it temporarily transforms the refugees into helpless cattle-like beings” (Ghosn & Al Saadi, 2018, p. 107 [5]). 

The Beginnings...

At first, when I began this project, I had anticipated its form to look entirely different to what it is now. Even the questions that I wanted to answer had changed. This difference between expectation and result, however, is only a natural part of research and undertaking new projects. To get an idea of what the original project intended as well as the questions, I have included my original research proposal below, which acted as the blueprint of my project as of February 22nd, 2023. 

However, the intentionality behind the program itself had remained the same throughout. The most crucial part of the program was that it was facilitated by refugee women for refugee women. Most importantly, the classroom space would become a sacred space for women (and only women) to voice their concerns, their struggles, their achievements, jokes, stories, and knowledge amongst each other and rely on one another as supports.

The main efforts were driven by a team of three of us, two of us as students in the M.A. Social Justice and Human Rights program at ASU and volunteers at LSS-SW to support the main facilitator, Sadaf Hakeem, in creating relevant curriculum content as well as facilitating a secure, comfortable, and knowledgeable environment for participants to be able to share in each others' expertise through lived experience and exploring the resources at their disposal. Thus, the WELDP was reimagined and born through participatory efforts for shared empowerment. 

To learn more about what the project manifested as, go to "The Project Itself" to see what we created with this methodology as an alternative curriculum!