Faith-Based Advocacy: How Christian Organisations Can Lead in Refugee Employment Solutions
Indeed, faith-based organisations have always been part of the answer to humanitarian disasters, the plight of marginalised populations and questions of pressing social justice. For Christian community-development and displacement organisations in particular, helping refugees get back to work is an ideal extension of their larger vision to do good. Theologically, they draw on a unique mix of moral, religious and occupational resources, and turn to the Bible for clues about what care ‘does not forget’ and ‘does not fail or break’. On a biblical theological anthropology of care, justice and hospitality, the Christian family has set the world’s gold standard on finding ways integrated employment that works for refugees and for the larger society. Christian groups can leverage their networks, resources and power to advocate for answers to the refugee employment question.
The Biblical Call to Action
The Christian Bible is full of exhortations to the Christian to provide food and shelter for the displaced and the dispossessed. ‘I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, a stranger and you welcomed me,’ says Jesus in Matthew 25:35-40. Hospitality to the stranger, the refugee, the asylum-seeker, is part of the core proposition of Christian faith.
Similarly, Leviticus 19:33-34 declares explicitly: When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself …Such teachings – and the faith tradition of which they are a part, which places such teaching at the core – motivates Christian humanitarian actors to advocate for displaced peoples.
How Christian Organisations Can Advocate for Refugee Employment
Moreover, Christian organisations occupy that seat of honour precisely because they’re positioned to promote refugee employment solutions. Greater refugee employment leads to greater self-sufficiency and, in turn, greater resilience, therefore reducing the burdens on many governments who currently bear the main responsibility for resettlement After all, through their networks – their churches, synagogues, mosques, community groups and non-profits – Christian groups can leverage those networks to support refugee employment through education in the community. Countless studies show that education in congregations and community groups about the barriers refugees face in finding jobs increases support for policies and programmes designed to facilitate refugees’ employment integration.
Second, the churches can foster a more direct relationship with corporations, inviting them to employ refugees in other ways, through corporate social responsibility programmes. Many companies are looking for ways to make a contribution to society, or to partner with faith-based organisations related to the refugee resettlement. Entrepreneurial employers of refugees play a valuable role in setting an example that showcases the social justice and openness to others that they aspire to be.
Third, Christian denominations, churches and other faith-based organisations can provide meaningful vocational assistance to refugees by offering services such as job-placement advice, mentoring and training, working directly with refugees as well as potential employers to place them in jobs and pass on the skills they need to be successful in the workplace. Such mentorship programmes, in particular, can help intentional migrants adjust to, and master, workplace norms, build the foundation of professional networks, and gain many of the skills that will help them along a career path over the long term.
Advocating for Policy Change
In addition to their work with refugees and employers, Christian organisations may also be able to campaign for changes to the rules affecting employment of refugees – such as lobbying policymakers to better recognise foreign qualifications, improve access to language classes, or offer incentives to businesses to hire refugees. In this way, Christian groups may change the bureaucratic rules restricting refugee employment.
Second, we observe that faith-based organisations – Christian and otherwise, and of all varieties – work together and with non-religious organisations to become amplified voices. Efforts to lobby for or against regulatory actions (usually highly polarised) start in clusters of like-minded organisations but must ultimately culminate in massive demonstrations of presence to cripple or at least impose powerful projections of numbers.
Leading with Compassion and Justice
Perhaps the most important starting point for Christian advocacy for refugee employment is a belief firmly rooted in compassion and justice. Another is the mandate for Christian organisations to help the poor, the deprived and the needy not just now, but in the future. Advocating for employment among refugees is one approach to doing this – to live out my faith in the here and now in ways that not only change lives but also leave a legacy for future generations.
Conclusion
But it’s iterative and urgent, and Christian organisations can play a unique, distinctive and urgent role in advancing humanitarian solutions for refugee employment. Embedded in the biblical ideals of compassion, justice and hospitality, they can bring capacities to convene for good jobs solutions for refugee integration – new opportunities to build dignified lives and contribute to the societies in which they find themselves. This includes leveraging networks, relationships with business, and lobbying for policy change to enhance both refugees’ prospects and those of their societies as a whole.
And as long as Christian people and groups follow his lead, struggling to open up the workplace to ever more excluded people, they are being, in as valid a sense as we can have access to, as Christian as Christ was himself – and also, as all those apostles once were. They are, precisely, doing what he came to do and to show.
