By supporting our 2011 Voice of Courage Luncheon you will help improve the lives of refugee women and children. Your support helps to ensure that women can access emergency reproductive health care, that children and families in immigrant detention centers are protected and that youth refugees can learn marketable skills and have better futures.
Since the Women’s Refugee Commission was established in 1989, we have been working hard to improve the lives of refugee women and children—and have made great progress. Highlights of these achievements include:
- We have joined forces with the World Food Programme’s Safe Access to Firewood and Alternative Energy in Humanitarian Settings (SAFE) initiative to provide specially designed, fuel-efficient mud stoves to more than 100,000 women in Sudan and 35,000 women in Uganda. As a result, women and girls won’t have to spend so much time searching for cooking fuel, which can expose them to the risk of rape and assault.
- We successfully advocated for the establishment of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Division of Unaccompanied Children’s Services (DUCS), which has improved the treatment of unaccompanied children immensely.
- We published a groundbreaking report, Locking Up Family Values: the Detention of Immigrant Families, which revealed the harsh, prison-like conditions where families were held. This led to the American Civil Liberties Union’s legal victory against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security’s decision to end family detention at the Hutto, Texas facility in 2009.
- We developed an online distance learning module to help doctors, nurses, midwives and other health workers in refugee settings provide critical reproductive health services and save lives in emergencies. To date, more than 1,800 individuals have passed the online Minimum Initial Services Package (MISP) module post-test and are now MISP-certified.
- We worked with Columbia University to develop the Market Assessment Toolkit to understand and expand the scope of jobs and trades open to refugee youth. The toolkit was field tested in northern Uganda and is now requested by humanitarian agencies globally and is recognized by donors, including the World Bank, as good practice.
- We produced the first-ever global research report on disabilities among refugees and conflict-affected populations, along with a companion resource kit guiding program practice on inclusion, equal access and full participation of individuals with disabilities.
Your support will allow us to continue to advocate for the needs of refugee women and children. We will continue to conduct research and fact-finding field missions and push for laws, policies and programs that bring lasting and measurable change to refugees across the globe.
Learn more about the history of the Women’s Refugee Commission and the work that we do in this video.