Theory of Change: #9: Can communities help refugees where governments fail?
Devex Podcasts

Theory of Change: #9: Can communities help refugees where governments fail?

B2Upper-intermediateSeptember 1, 20261 hr 16 min

In the latest episode of the Theory of Change podcast, Nazanin Ash, CEO of Welcome.US, discussed how community-driven sponsorship could revolutionize refugee resettlement, bypass political gridlock, and offer a scalable alternative to overburdened government systems. Global forced displacement is at an all-time high, and standard, bureaucratic response models are failing to keep pace. Ash argued that mobilizing local communities rather than relying solely on government aid can unlock massive potential and provide orderly, human-centered pathways for newcomers. The problem: Traditional global systems are built for short-term, state-versus-state displacement, but modern conflicts — predominantly civil wars — are protracted, lasting decades on aver...

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Problems that the humanitarian system was not built to account for.

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There are two immense problems at the heart of humanitarian relief today. Problems that the humanitarian system was not built to account for. The first is that conflicts last a really long time. With a few notable exceptions, most wars are not fought between countries, but rather within

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them, and these tend to simmer and persist and inflict damage for years. The second is that people who are forcibly displaced by these protracted crises rarely go back home. Instead, many refugees remain stuck in limbo, consigned either to camps that are underfunded

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and under-equipped to provide long-term solutions, or to a refugee resettlement system that has has been battered by politics and populist rhetoric. It's a conversation that often quickly devolves into binaries, into the patterns of polarization

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