Action for Women

Action for Women, whose main mission is to provide safety, support and hope to women (including trans women) who have fled conflict, violence and persecution, through the Pomegranate Project. The Pomegranate Project is a protection and empowerment model, born from the voices of our participants, to actively remove the many barriers they have expressed to us, in order to recover from their trauma, and rediscover resilience for reintegration into society. The objective is the recovery, resilience and re-integration of refugee and asylum-seeking women:

RECOVERY:
To provide a women-only safe space and women-friendly environment that facilitates GBV survivors to feel safe, comfortable and respected in disclosing and seeking support with their recovery
To ensure safe and equal access to GBV services for survivors

RESILIENCE:
To support and equip refugee and asylum-seeking women with the confidence, skills, knowledge and resources needed to access services and to claim their rights
To enable refugee women to access dignified and sustainable livelihoods opportunities and break the cycle of dependency

RE-INTEGRATION:
To foster a sense of community, solidarity and friendship between Greek and refugee women and support with the building of bridges across cultures
To ensure equal opportunities and equal pay for both Greek and refugee women in the team

The model consists of four pillars, such as skills acquisition, protection, mental health and psychosocial support and livelihoods, supported by an all-female team of translators and childcare personnel. Since 2016 we have been listening and responding to the needs of refugee and asylum-seeking women, adapting our model and approach to ensure sustainable impact. The Pomegranate Project has proven its effectiveness in supporting the recovery, resilience and re-integration of refugee and asylum-seeking women, including with a staggering 88% of shelter residents having successfully secured employment whilst accessing our shelter.

The model is comprised of:

Protection
Shelter to keep women and their children safe from harm
A women-only safe space to gather and build solidarity
Mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS), including individual and group counselling, and trauma-informed yoga to promote healing and recovery
Access to GBV case workers and interpreters to facilitate access to GBV services that are not provided on-site, often with accompaniment

Empowerment
Skills-acquisition: Greek language classes to improve access to services and interaction with the host community; and IT literacy classes to write CVs and develop the skills to search and apply for jobs and to foster self-sufficiency through navigating online services
Access to job counselling and the opportunity for a dignified income with the creation and production of a range of income-generating products as part of Shop for Good
Active recruitment of both Greek and refugee women into the team to foster diversity and enable meaningful working relations across cultures

This combination of activities and services serves to build resilience and autonomy, breaking the cycle of dependency and vulnerability that refugee and asylum-seeking women often face. Most critically, the model proactively removes the barriers that refugee and asylum-seeking women face in accessing and benefiting from available services and claiming their rights. These barriers include childcare responsibilities, language barriers, trauma and the barrier posed by mixed-sex spaces (driven by both cultural traditions and religious beliefs, and for GBV survivors, also by the trauma they experienced). To this end, we offer a women-only safe space, female interpreters and childcare.

The model has been piloted, and has proven to show results. For the foreseeable future, we will be focusing on

• Ensuring the model is sustainable - and offers security - by transitioning from volunteer-based stipends to salaries for volunteers and ensuring a focus on diversifying funding sources;
• Scaling the model to reach more women from the refugee and asylum-seeking community; and
• Documenting lessons learned to secure additional funding (which will support with the Project’s sustainability) and to support a multitude of actors in Greece and beyond to adapt their modalities to enable sustainable impact. This is particularly important for shelters, since these often lack an exit strategy and fail to break the cycle of dependence and vulnerability GBV survivors find themselves in.