Taban Shoresh knows what it means to experience conflict and displacement. As a child, her family were forced to flee during former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s genocide of the Kurds in northern Iraq. They ended up in the United Kingdom where Shoresh went on to have a successful career in finance, before quitting her job to volunteer with Yazidi women and girls fleeing persecution by the Islamic State in Kurdistan.
Shoresh went on to found The Lotus Flower, a nonprofit that supports women and girls impacted by conflict and displacement. People with lived experience of an issue must be included in decision-making and program design, Shoresh told Devex. “In any program design that we do, we think about what community members do we include in this? We hire people from within the camps; we hire people from the host community,” she said.
Shoresh also stressed the importance of unrestricted, multiyear funding for local groups and partners. She cited The Lotus Flower’s partnership with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees — which awarded the organization with an NGO Innovation Award in 2022 that included access to some unrestricted funding — as an example of a positive shift in this direction.
Watch the full video to hear from Shoresh about her story and why local organizations need access to long-term flexible funding.
Dig into Roots of Change, a series examining the push toward locally led development.
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