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Refugees and Asylum Seekers Participatory Action Research – RAPAR – is a human rights organization, founded in 2001.

"Participation is the child, not of power, but of communal need" (Revans, R. W Action Learning in Hospitals, London: McGraw-Hill, 1976.)

Alongside local people, displaced people (i.e. refugees and people seeking asylum from anywhere in the world, and people moving to the UK from Eastern Europe) are among the leaders who shape and decide RAPAR's agenda.

RAPAR does:

• Casework, very often using our interpreting and translation skills to enable communication, in the following areas: Deportation; Education; Employment; Family Reunion; Financial hardship; Health; Housing; Indigence (often called Destitution); Safety; Training Opportunities; Violence; Volunteering Opportunities
  
  
• Group and Project Development about: Action Learning; Crossing Cultures, Developing and releasing human capacities to self-manage, and to self- and other- advocate; Developing educational resources to illuminate pathways into learning with adults and to address the exclusion of young people from higher education; English Language Skills; How to live together well; Human Rights and Human Responsibilities; Intergenerational communication and sharing; Verbal and Written Self-expression; What makes a refugee?

We use action learning and research approaches in our work because we know that they can enable people to self-activate and self-manage in response to their problems Our action learning and research with dispersed people releases human capacities to self-express with confidence and to learn how to thoroughly describe and articulate, and therefore communicate and share, the nature of problems, and ideas about how to address them and transform them into solutions.

RAPAR is acutely sensitive to the rapid pace and scale of change that is taking place within the composition of displaced people, and we know how to work with those change processes in creative partnerships.

Refugees are not born - they are made. As a researching organisation we recognise the fundamental impact of conflict upon the composition of people who become displaced. See the International Crisis Group for monthly updates on continuing conflicts that create refugees.

If you have ideas about doing something that aims to make a constructive difference, being concerned with issues that effect both local people and people who have moved in from other countries, then please get in touch at admin@rapar.org.uk. We would like to hear from you and, if we can, to help.

RAPAR is a registered charity (1095961) and a company limited by guarantee (04387010)