Movement-building capacity

Migreat

Netherlands

June 2024

Mi Great is a grassroots, people-powered movement campaigning against Europe’s oppressive border regime, working to dismantle the power structures that systematically oppress and exploit people, particularly those from the Global South. The organisation advocates for the freedom of movement, safe migration pathways, and resisting discriminatory border policies. Its programming includes building collective capacity by working closely with mutual aid collectives at the external(ised) EU borders, organizing the first-ever nation-wide “MOVE” demo in the Netherlands, and building towards lasting institutional change with diverse stakeholders.

Sienos Grupė

Lithuania

July 2024

Since 2021, Sienos Grupė has been the primary locally-founded actor combating border violence and systemic discrimination against migrants in Lithuania. This year, they opened a vibrant interfaith, intercultural community centre in the heart of Vilnius, designed to foster connection, solidarity, and capacity through holistic well-being events for migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers; political education workshops; and direct legal and health services. Their ongoing work also includes closely monitoring the cases of human rights violations at the borders, building and activating Lithuanian civil society’s solidarity with migrants, and advocating at legislative and electoral levels for progressive policy change.

Border Violence Monitoring Network

Balkan region

2024

Border Violence Monitoring Network includes 13+ grassroots organisations working together to document human rights violations along the Balkan migration route and bringing these injustices to light through a multi-level advocacy strategy at national, European, and UN levels. The network seeks to consolidate its monitoring activities at the borders, make cases and testimonies of border violence visible and open-source through monthly audited reports, and build an effective joint strategy to address criminalisation and the malpractices of ‘managing’ migration flows at borders in this region. It is currently building the first ever legal database in this region, addressing how advocacy efforts must be conjoined with effective research and a focused litigation strategy.

Arci Porco Rosso

Italy

2024

"From Sea to Prison" is an activist project in Palermo that works with and for people criminalized for having driven themselves and others across Italy's maritime border. It monitors the systematic arrest of people upon arrival in Italy, as well as their trials and sentencing. The project provides social-legal support to people in prison and after release, and advocates against the criminalization of freedom of movement. Working with local and transnational networks, it reports on the legal and political developments in the criminalization of people on the move, both in Italy and beyond.

The project involves a wide group of people – some of whom were also previously imprisoned and have since become part of the local community – and maintains regular contact with prisoners via letter, writing in a range of languages including Arabic, English, Farsi, Italian, Russian and Turkish. Carried out by the collective and community space ‘Porco Rosso’ in Palermo, and in collaboration with the NGO borderline-europe, its activists bring together a diverse set of knowledge and life experiences, finding connection through the common struggle for freedom of movement.

Borderless Collective

Germany

2023

We resourced a capacity-building project with Borderless Collective aimed at enhancing and advancing expertise within civil society efforts supporting illegalised migrants. This year-long initiative convened participants working on this topic across various EU countries, and topics were identified through a participatory process to address existing gaps in the grassroots scene: project management, logistics, social media and public relations, critical whiteness, queer-feminism, decolonisation, and more. By ensuring diverse representation from different groups at these sessions, the aim is to multiply the capacity-building impact as participants disseminate the knowledge gained within their own organisations.

Pasol Communità di Supporto alla Solidarietà

Italy

2023

We seeded Casa del Mutuo Soccorso (House of Mutual Aid) in Partinico, Sicily, an initiative that cultivates the growth of resilient communities centered on deep ecological relationships against the exploitation of people and land. This co-operative community center arises out of self-organised coalitions between Italian activists and African migrant agricultural workers, who have independently come together since 2015 to oppose exploitation of migrant labor and precarious shelter conditions.

They’ve built up grassroots resistance to the Italian agro-industrial sector across Sicily, Calabria, Puglia, Campania and the northern part of the country – a map of labor mobility that overlaps with trajectories of people arriving in Europe through the Central Mediterranean. The inter-ethnic community space acts as a centralised point for migrant agricultural workers to build power in coalition with local trade unions during olive harvest season, as well as activate civil society's consciousness through public events on the intersection of migration, agriculture, and labor.

No Name Kitchen

Bosnia, Serbia, Greece, Montenegro, Spain

2022

Created from the grassroots when migrants and international activists met in Belgrade in 2017 and decided to cook together, No Name Kitchen is an independent civil movement supporting the right to move freely when seeking a better, dignified life. With 24/7 presence on the ground, the initiative combines frontline humanitarian support with detailed and participatory documentation of border violence. It transforms collected data on pushbacks, psychological damage, direct physical violence, and violations of human rights especially against women and minors into political action through advocacy to policy makers, denouncing systematic violations of human rights at the external European borders.

Weekly assemblies and coalition-building with dozens of collectives help No Name Kitchen fulfill their role as a crucial human rights ‘watchdog’ providing a multi-country intervention for migrants along and around the Balkan and Mediterranean routes.

Transborder Summer Camp

France

2022

The Transborder Camp is the largest grassroots-centric and self-organised gathering of an “underground railroad” for and with movements working on forced migration. We resourced its second ever iteration with 700+ participants of migrants and activists across Europe and Africa coming together for several days at Zone à Défendre (Zone of Defense) in Nantes, France, an autonomous area occupied by grassroots activists defending the forest and meadow environment from an airport construction. Strategic exchange took place through horizontal discussions in small groups with multiple simultaneous languages: 40+ parallel workshops were on the program, ranging from relationship and trust-building, critical reflections on movement wins and losses, sharing insight into cross-border struggles, and collectively building an intersectional approach to migrant justice across the realms of queer-feminism, climate, digital justice, and more.

In addition to financial support, we attended the Camp as an in-person annual retreat, strategising about the development of the Fund and deepening our relationships on an eye-to-eye level with the transnational migrant justice ecosystem.

Europe Must Act

Pan-European

2021

Beginning in 2020 with a call for radical change from grassroots organisers working in Greece, Europe Must Act has grown into an important civil society movement with local groups in 58 cities across 21 European countries. Its united vision is to build a network of solidarity that can adapt to the changing migration patterns of the 21st century and highlight the malpractice of repressive European migration policies. Its campaigning platform is based on a diversity of combined tactics: a regular blog on migration policy, grassroots reports from Aegean Sea route, participatory “Raising Voices” testimonies of migrants in Greek refugee camps, and building localized structures – #CitiesMustAct – to demonstrate a broad alliance of European civil society in support of safe migration routes and dignified rights for migrants.

Community Kitchen

Niger

2021

Community kitchens have always played an important role across mutual aid practices and interconnected fights for food, class, and racial justice. Involving cross-border stakeholders from Niger, Mali, Togo, Morocco, Germany, and Austria, the weekly community kitchen in Agadez, Niger offers a practical solution for migrants who have been stranded. Migrants' struggle for dignified life has become even more precarious due to the global pandemic, exaggerating the globally uneven impacts of health apartheid.

This regular communal space plays many roles: it fosters solidarity and trust between various communities, serves as a hub for developing lived experience leadership, and enhances the organising capacity and holistic well-being of displaced populations. As a crucial support structure and movement-building base, it also collects participatory testimonies of migrants in the systematically overlooked situation in the Sahel-Saharan zone, advancing advocacy efforts across national and international media.

Palermo and Dakar Convergences

Italy, Senegal

2021

Under the banner “from the sea to the city,” a slogan that encompasses the transborder linkages of solidarity work for migrant justice, two parallel gatherings in Palermo, Italy and Dakar, Senegal took place with 250+ members of civil society organizations and grassroots social movements across Europe and in the African regions of Tunisia, Morocco, Niger, and Mali. Throughout several days, practices and visions for freedom of movement were collectively discussed, with a focus on practical workshops and reflections on recent legislation of externalised EU migration policies impacting regional and transnational activist structures.

Moreover, this rare in-person gathering mitigated the barriers of security and time sensitivity typical to remote coordination, allowing in-depth reflection on various experiences of the last several years, sparking an evaluation of united visions, goals, and relationships built for the future.

Skills 4 Utopia

Germany, pan-European

2021

Skills for Utopia is a grassroots-oriented political education collective training activists and political groups across and beyond Europe. Throughout 24 workshops and webinars, and with a network of 30+ qualified trainers, the collective provided expertise for practical, free skill-sharing directly tailored to migrant justice organisers and support structures at the external EU borders. Results included support groups in strategically dreaming of utopic visions, launching effective public campaigns, engaging knowledgeable with cyber security, and deconstructing power-critical structures.

Skill-sharing becomes increasingly important to strengthen the tissue of our movements. As an activist-led collective, with low-barrier and cost-free trainings, Skills4Utopia is specifically intended to be accessible to and empower smaller groups, grassroots activists, and directly impacted populations to benefit from the program. Their training approach enables activists to share gained knowledge within their organisations and beyond, creating a multiplying effect of capacity-building.

ReFOCUS Media Labs

pan-European

2020

ReFOCUS Media Labs is dedicated to educating and training refugee citizen journalists, providing unique and fair opportunities for displaced individuals to tell their own stories and reclaim their autonomy within a dominant media landscape that often speaks for them instead of with them. The training is conducted by those directly affected by complex crises. The multi-media content in video, photography, and testimony produced through this initiative is utilised not only by humanitarian organisations like Sea Watch, Human Rights Watch, and One Happy Family Center Lesbos, but also by major news outlets such as the BBC. This approach meaningfully helps build a global network advocating for migrant rights through participatory narrative change.