Empower Youth Trust – Empowering Refugee Youth for the Future
Empower Youth Trust (Empower) has a mission to empower, educate, and enable refugee youth in Aotearoa New Zealand through education, leadership, and capacity-building to pursue meaningful paths of their choice and contribute to their communities socially, economically, and environmentally. This youth-led charitable organisation fosters mutually rewarding relationships by bringing together young Kiwi mentors with young refugee background students to help them contribute to their communities socially, economically, and environmentally.
Empower provides the structure and support that every mentor and student needs to develop a close personal relationship. Mentors gain a holistic understanding of their student’s individual talents, aspirations, and challenges, so that they are able to provide a high level of support and empowerment. It also seeks to address the underrepresentation of refugees in higher education in Aotearoa New Zealand and provide a youth-specific support network within the resettlement process.
Rawan Saadi is responsible for coordinating the Empower youth mentoring programme. She believes the team’s lived experience is well-placed to support young people from a refugee background.
“Empower’s mission is rooted and dependent on our organisation being refugee youth-led. As refugee youth who have been through the education system in Aotearoa, we understand the challenges first-hand and work closely with the rangatahi in our programmes to support them with the goals they have set for themselves. We can help newly arrived refugee youth navigate the challenges they face because we have also been there. The peer-to-peer approach of our programme is key to our success,” says Rawan.
Empower has developed a series of workshops that build the leadership skills, confidence, and capacity-building skills of refugee youth to enable access to new opportunities. Called ‘Empower for the Future’, the workshops encourage critical and reflecting thinking skills to ensure refugee youth remain agents of their own decisions. The main aim of the workshops is to introduce participants to a wide range of services and skills that will be useful as they move through higher education. The team believes that to make serious progress towards a more equitable Aotearoa New Zealand, the inherent inequalities in education must be addressed. In that way, no one will be left behind.
Rawan acknowledges that developing the workshops is not without its challenges.
“Designing programmes for young people, with all their diverse interests and needs is always a challenge no matter what their background is. However, this challenge grows significantly when youth come from disadvantaged and marginalised backgrounds. Empower works with refugee background youth aged predominantly between 15 and 19 years, most of whom are attending secondary school. Getting these young people involved in development programmes comes with a wide spectrum of challenges from language barriers and cultural differences, to transport and location.
These all require some specific attention but overall the key to tackling any of these issues is co-design and engagement. The fact that we are refugee youth-led, makes us more relatable and approachable. However, we need to go further by making an effort to connect with young people. This starts by forming relationships with secondary schools, and more specifically with teachers and staff that work with refugee students so that they trust us to come speak to the students they are responsible for.
Many of the challenges we are dealing with cannot be solved all at once by engaging. However, being open and connected with the young people we work with is the first and most critical step in forming solid relationships where everyone feels comfortable to voice their needs,” says Rawan.
The Empower for the Future workshops operate with the understanding that all young people have strengths that can be realised, especially in environments that support and nurture them. Enabling young people to be active agents in their own development inspires and motivates them to follow their chosen paths so that they will have the skills and capability to contribute to their communities in the future.
Empower Youth Trust has some big goals ahead involving increasing its intake of the young people it supports and expanding throughout Aotearoa New Zealand. In the past, the programme was restricted to Auckland, with all volunteers, mentors, and mentees based there. Recognising that a successful programme needs to be accessible to as many people as possible, Empower opened volunteer and mentor applications across the country. Currently, there are volunteers and mentors in Wellington, Hamilton, Dunedin, and Christchurch.
“Moving forward we would like to increase our intake each year and eventually have mentors and mentees across all the settlement locations across Aotearoa where refugees are trying to rebuild a new life for themselves,” says Rawan.
The J R McKenzie Trust has been honoured to support the Empower for the Future mahi, alongside The Tindall Foundation.