Fugee: PSU Protection Shield
“True partnership means … being willing to receive as well as to give; to listen to refugees as well as to talk to refugees; to be questioned by refugees as well as to ask questions; and finally, to use all resources for the refugees to enable them to face their past, live their present and hope for a better future.” Father Agberagba, August 2000.
Fugee School provides primary, secondary and tertiary education opportunities for refugee children and asylum seekers, mainly from Somalia, Yemen, and Syria.
Their core mission is to ignite an endless passion for learning in every child.
Project Stand Up (PSU) grew from a Development Studies class at the Fugee School. PSU is now run by Fugee School alumni. Fugee sparked our existence. Fugee has impacted over 400 children and youth including our team as Fugee alumni.
PSU is a youth initiative that is focused on improving youth participation, decision-making and improving access to education for the refugee youth, particularly girls and young women. PSU is governed using youth-adult partnership (YAP) methodology and Refugee Led Action Principles.
As our founding partner, Fugee supports us on the ground and provides us with legal protection since PSU isn’t a legal entity. They also host a multipurpose space for us to work on our mission and vision. Moving from “For Refugees” To “With Refugees.”
We are proud to have Fugee stand with us by providing us with the legal protection we need to exist in Malaysia. This is a particularly challenging subject even though the systems (at a global level) are created to help us but are in fact disempowering us to continue our work.
Here’s how that works:
Funding is always a challenge in CBOs and refugee-led initiatives because it’s hard to access funding opportunities. Refugees feel like they need to beg for their rights from the large organization that is responsible and holding the funds.
Acknowledgment is also another thing that we want to have as refugees that we are capable of and better at creating solutions for our problems. Rather than having a non-refugee who may have studied humanitarian subjects but never actually experienced the challenges of being a refugee, not saying that their solutions are not helpful, allowing people from the community who have undergone the pain and struggle of seeking asylum.
People say we want to give the refugees opportunities to lead, however, that's not the case in reality. Because refugees have difficulties in owning what they create for various reasons, but most importantly it is the legal process of registering as an organization that makes it really hard. This is why PSU wants to make a change and we are glad that we are not alone in this because Fugee is supporting us. We want change and equalize the currently top-down humanitarian framework. We expect the change to happen from the bottom, the grassroots level and that's most impactful because of what we have seen in our Project from impacts that we have on different levels.
On a community level, our access to and sincere trust with the helped us to communicate and implement our project with them. That connection led us to create a space where our community members with the adults and youth, women and men feel safe to share opinions freely and uninhibitedly.
On an individual level, our design team gained a plethora of soft skills and discovered our willpower to pursue what we’re passionate about, which enabled us to dream and work on making our dreams a reality.
There is no doubt that Fugee champions equality and access with and by refugees to bridge learning gaps and nurture self-reliance across communities. By standing with PSU, together we have and will continue to show the world how it's done!