Partners in Europe and Year of Inception

Following are the profiles of the eight organisations who are part of this learning journey along with an excerpt of their proposed project for 2023:

Comitato or The Committee for the Civil Rights of Prostitutes onlus (CDCP ApS), Italy, founded in 1983, works with the main goal of advocating for the recognition of the human, social and labour rights of sex workers at a local, national, and international scale.

In the project titled Still I Rise - SIR, Comitato plans to apply its long-standing expertise in training project beneficiaries to become peers or linguistic and cultural mediators. This will be a tailor-made training course for one or two people as concrete examples for other survivors who face the negative impact of stringent immigration legislation and the non-recognition of their human rights. The training will provide them with knowledge of the Italian labour market, legislation on immigration, and work as social operators. It will attend to suggestions made by the survivors themselves on how to approach migrant communities and engage with them on different issues.

Intervention and Sensitization against Trafficking Mission (MIST), France, established in 2020 is a community-based organization in France, created by a group of survivors of Trafficking in Human Beings (THB) who mobilize themselves to combat human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation through a participative approach.

This project titled ‘Empowering survivors in social work against THB: Focus on Ethics and Advocacy’ is an extension of MIST’s previous project “Empowering survivors in social work against THB” in 2022. Active members of MIST benefited from the community organizing training by a French organization called “Organisez-vous”. As a result of this training, they gathered into a group they called “Roots” and created the MIST rules and regulation booklet. In 2023, MIST will support “Roots” with a capacity-building process focused on ethics and advocacy. This group becomes the Ethic Council of Mist to define the internal process for active members, delegates, and spokesperson to help them to achieve their mission of peace-making (with delegates) and advocacy (with spokespersons) in a genuinely participatory way. 

Melissa: Network of Migrant Women, Greece, founded in 2014 is a network for migrant and refugee women in Greece promoting their empowerment, integration into Greek society, and active citizenship. 

This project titled ‘Transformational Leadership Training for women leaders from diverse origin’ was chosen to emphasise migrant and refugee women’s innate vast potential for leadership, too often unrecognized and untapped. This project acknowledges migrant women with experience in a leadership role and engages them in all its levels and phases, such as in planning and implementation of a leadership integration pathway program. This approach will enhance and strengthen their leadership skills, drawing from their own interaction and exchange, per their own request and desire to support each other and grow together, rather than through an external theoretical expert in a specialized, yet restricted, field.

Southeast and East Asian Centre, United Kingdom, registered in 2020, is a community organisation for and by migrants, refugees, and people seeking asylum from East and Southeast Asia (ESEA) and people of these heritages living in the UK.

The project titled ‘Voice and Participation of Vietnamese Migrants: Lived experiences of migration, “everyday borders”, doing and seeking work in the UK’ will involve employability skills training, rights informing workshops, and other advocacy and campaign activities. This is based on SEEAC’s previously conducted sharing and training on employment rights information with the community of Vietnamese Migrants. This has been developed in consultation with their partner organisation, Nails Viet Association (NVA), who have shared that the coverage of the mainstream media and the treatment from the law enforcement and the immigration authorities caused a public backlash against the Vietnamese beauty industry that damaged the community and their businesses.