Created by Centre for Peace Studies
We are a Croatian NGO that offers help and counselling to migrants and refugees. We are looking for the opportunity to increase our capacity by improving the communication and information flows between our NGO and the migrants seeking for help. We believe that information is key to integration of migrants in the welcoming society.
Integration of migrants and refugees is one of the main issues in Croatian society. In general, there are still several missconception of migration and there are not enough efforts done in order to implement effective programs and projects that could successfully improve the integration of newcomers within the Croatian community.
The NGO Centre for Peace Studies works together with refugees and migrants who left their countries in order to find new opportunities in new countries. The objective is offer counselling and help in different topics (e.g. access to health care, residence permits, access to international protection, integration). However, once refugees and migrants arrive to Croatia, they have to face several challenges and obstacles: new system, new language, lack of awareness of their rights, mistrust on the public authorities,... The public authorities do not have the capacity to react adequately and that implies that refugees and migrants are in a very vulnerable position after arrival. There is a huge lack of information and communication flow between public authorities and migrants.
A very important part of our job is to offer current and trustful information to migrants and refugees but we realized that most of the information is in Croatian, which is not helpful for migrants who just arrived, and not always useful and up to date. This issue implies that we spend a lot of time looking for this information. We lack the capacity to create a more transversal system that could facilitate our job. Access to information is a basic first step for a successful integration in socitey.
Our target group are migrants and refugees living in Zagreb. We have direct contact with them because we coordinate several projects regarding integration in education and labour market. This is one of the main target groups of our organization because we give regularly counselling to third-country citizens and refugees. We try to develop different projects to improve our job but we are always working within the limitations of the public authorities and our capacity as NGO.
Our organization has been working for a long time with refugees and migrants but our work has multiplied itself since 2015 when more refugees started arriving. We provide them with counselling to apply for residence permit or international protection. We also offer counselling to integrate them in the labour market and/or education system and give support to migrants and refugees with minors in order to enroll them in the public education system and help them to have access to languages courses.
The champion of this challenge will be Sara Kekus, who is already directly involved in different projects and programs regarding integration of migrants and refugees in the labour market and in the education system.
We are active participants in different projects that allow us increase the quality in our mission. We are a very open and welcoming organization that works towards a more equal and fair society and we believe in cooperation as an excellent way to find new and innovative solutions to common problems. Our job requires access to information, information that public authorities are not always keen to offer easly. At the same, the information is found in Croatian language, which makes very complicated the communication flowm given the fact that migrants do not speak it yet.
We are looking for a solution that help us develop our job more effectively by improving the communication flow between us and the migrants.
We are an organization with a strong networks of local partners and stakeholders. If we recieve a satisfactory solution to our challenge, we offer our expertise from a more practical point of view. We have direct contact with refugees and migrants, so we are aware of the challenges they face regularly. We will definitely offer dissemination and promotion from the solution provider and its innovative idea. Regarding potential partnershop and investment, we have a strong network of stakeholders who support us in our mission. However, the commitment of the stakeholders will depend on the solutions provided and its technicalities.
We are working on improving our job every day and we will give our best to develop a project if a solution is offered. We are committed with our work and this is a perfect opportunities to expand partnership and to learn from other organization which encounter similar situations.
