About Us
ChangeMakers Refugee Forum is a rights-based, non-government organisation (NGO) representing 14 refugee-background communities in Wellington New Zealand.
These communities are the Afghani, Assyrian, Burmese, Colombian, Eritrean, Ethiopian, Iraqi, Oromo, Sierra Leone, Somali, Sudanese, Rwandan, Ugandan and Zimbabwean.
Our vison is:
New Zealanders from refugee backgrounds participate fully in New Zealand life.
We work towards that vision through community development, research, and advocacy activities.
What is a rights-based approach?
At ChangeMakers being a rights-based organisation means that our strategic outcomes, policies, and the way we work with communities and other agencies are all underpinned by human rights.
In practice this means:
Our Strategic Plan 2011-2016 focuses on rights. By 2016, communities will have increased understanding of their rights and how to go about claiming them, and we will have worked with other agencies to increase their understanding of how a rights-based approach applies to their work.
Our policies are underpinned by a rights-based approach. This includes our Diversity Policy, which is informed by the Bill of Rights Act 1990, and our Personnel Policy.
At an operational level, we begin any new initiative by ensuring that the way we will conduct our work is rights-based. We do this by completing ChangeMakers' rights-based programming checklist. As well as being an effective planning tool, this template is a good reminder of the underlying principles that form the basis of rights-based approaches:
· accountability
· transparency
· non-discrimination and
· participation
If you would like to know more about our work or are interested in upcoming workshops on a human rights-based approaches, contact our research coordinator, Alia Bloom.
