Living Well Together Resource

The FOCUS Living Well Together Resource is a guide to help policy makers, civil society organisations and communities understand important dimensions of dynamic integration and how to implement them in practice and programming.

Incorporating Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) as a stand-alone integral dimension to successful integration practices highlights the importance of concretely addressing mental health and psychosocial needs and providing psychosocial support as part of standard practice.

The FOCUS Approach to Dynamic Integration recommends moving away from a sole focus on trauma-informed care and ensure mental health and psychosocial considerations are considered more broadly.

Implementing staff and volunteers should be trained to broaden their understanding of MHPSS not only as a vehicle for the identification and management of clinical mental health conditions, but as an avenue to strengthen social and community supports to broadly improve individual and community levels of wellbeing.

Dynamic integration programmes should consider psychosocial aspects of practice and ensure those working with the forcibly displaced are able to identify and refer persons in distress and connect them with appropriate services. Specialised mental health care should be provided in a way that is culturally sensitive and informed and consider topics such as racism and discrimination.

The importance of establishing and reinforcing continuous social bonds, social bridges between receiving and arriving communities and community members’ social links to relevant services has long been acknowledged in research. Contact between groups has been noted as an important factor in influencing attitudes, emotions and behavioural intentions receiving and arriving community members can have about each other.

More important than quantity of contact is the quality and nature of those interactions. Safe supportive spaces are essential for meaningful interactions.

The categorisation as an ‘arriving’ or ‘receiving’ community member is not fixed, with arriving community members becoming part of the receiving community over time as part of the integration journey.

FOCUS has identified volunteerism as a powerful vehicle for quality interactions between communities as it provides a crucial entry-point to the community for newly arrived persons and can engage receiving community members in integration practices beyond the typical ‘helper/recipient of care’ dynamic.

Ensuring the targeted communities are part of programme assessment, design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation is crucial to instil community ownership of dynamic integration practices. Asking community members to contribute to programme assessment and design ensures that the implemented practice is culturally and contextually relevant and adequately addresses core needs of all parts of the community.

Community members can be drivers of their own care and should be meaningfully involved in all stages of integration-focused programming. This means shifting the view of community participation from being community members as passive recipients of care to viewing community members as active participants in developing initiatives that aim to strengthen individual and collective wellbeing.

Ensuring equal participation between receiving and arriving community members allows for the establishment of a sense of equality in the creations of relationships and dynamics between and within groups. Giving community members an opportunity to provide input into their care also helps instil a sense of empowerment, autonomy and respect, aligning well with core humanitarian principles.

An additional benefit of participatory and co-creative approaches that is often not considered is the potential impact on the participating refugee’s social capital which has the potential to lead to wider socioeconomic benefits.

Given the diverse socioeconomic needs of both arriving and receiving communities, the establishment of partnerships and coordination with all relevant stakeholders within private enterprise, government and the non-profit sector is essential.

As an example, developing connections between integration programmes and MHPSS actors is crucial, however linkages must also be made with a diverse range of services that support various other aspects of integration. These include services and organisations in the areas of housing, education, work, leisure and health and social care that equally address the arriving and the receiving community’s needs.

Such partnerships can assist in addressing socioeconomic and sociopsychological factors integral to facilitating integration. An example of this could be partnering with private business to create opportunities for apprenticeships or on-the-job training to ease the transition into the labour market.

Linkages with municipalities and key government representatives ensure the sustainability of programming and are an opportunity to advocate for change to alleviate common post-migration stressors hampering integration efforts. Advocacy initiatives ensure equal and equitable access to services, tailored to needs, for both receiving and arriving communities.