Overarching Goal

Self-sufficient women ensure family and community success

Empowered women create opportunities for themselves, their families, and the communities around them.  Self-sufficiency ensures respect.
By educating women, they discover careers enabling creativity, mastery, challenge, and a sense-of-purpose.  In an effort to reciprocate the assistance they received, resettled women will serve in new refugee resettlement efforts.

Key Outcomes

Women Are Healthy

Women’s ability to access quality affordable healthcare for themselves and their children enhances their physical and mental strength for the difficult job of relocating.

When women are informed about proper health and hygiene practices they are more likely to develop a self-sufficient lifestyle that is financially successful.  Cultural differences can make the simplest health or hygiene task unknowable in the host country – without education, women suffer in unhealthy or unsanitary conditions.

Women Have Strong Social Networks

By working in groups, women benefit from the social support system and create their own social networks for the promotion of the physical, financial, and community health.

The United Nations Development Programme “Gender Approaches in Conflict and Non-Conflict Situations” states that women require novel social networks in the host country because of the destruction of traditional gender roles in the house and employment.

Women Make Decisions In Their Communities

Empowered women understand their value to society and are able to demand their equality in gender roles with respect to finances, family, and developing social networks.

Women are more likely to return benevolence to other women, paying forward the assistance they received through time, social commitments, and money.

Women Are Safe

The trauma of war, poverty, and relocation are compounded when unsympathetic hosts attempt to force women into work before they have settled their homes and family.  Women are stronger when they have a solid base from which to conduct their lives.

A 2003 Feminist Review Study of Bosnian Women Refugees shows that, in contrast to men, women are often most adaptable to work in the host country, but it is often downwardly mobile or, worst case, part of a black market where rights are nonexistent.

Women Create Their Own Opportunities and Earn Income

Education and employment are the two most critical components to ensuring self-sufficiency, proper parenting, and strong community leadership.

Women reinvest a much higher portion in their families and communities (Women reinvest 90% of their income in their families and communities, compared with men who reinvest only 30% to 40%)