Break Isolation Group

Vision:

A society where every woman can freely express, decide and fully exercise her rights.

Mission:

To bring a change to the current asylum system, abolish the “Lagers” and break the isolation caused by this form of accommodation as well as open all borders.

BIG aims at building the capacity of the women and empowering them to navigate through the Asylum system using a peer to peer approach and empowerment program. Through a multiplier and snow-balling approach in the lagers the program enhances the capacity of the women to be champions that advocate for their own rights and needs.

Isolation and discrimination within the asylum process continue to have an immense negative impact on women’s well being, mental and physical health, seriously challenging equal life chances. This situation worsened with the Corona pandemic that created a double isolation. BIG continues to maintain contact with the women in these lagers thus breaking the isolation through the lager reports(link to lager reports) and out of this develop podcasts that address and discuss some of the emerging issues and challenges from these reports at length (link to podcasts). BIG acknowledges the complexity and diversity of women’s experiences and therefore seeks to build collaborative efforts that end all forms of oppression,exploitation and violation of their fundamental human rights by condemning all forms of these vices. Amid these rigid and oppressive asylum structures, processes and systems, we are fighting and advocating for socio-political justice, equality and respect of human rights

Implementation

We organize and lead workshops in the IWS office focusing on legal and medical advice, education and employment as well as other day to day social emerging needs affecting the women.

We organize and lead Lager visits, reaching out continuously to the women newly arriving in Germany and we publish Lager reports, which reveals the situation of the women in the lager to the public.

BIG explores and embraces all networking opportunities and also actively participates in political demonstrations, campaigns and events that promote inclusion and address collective women’s struggles, social rights change as well as enhance a sustainable social support network among the women.

In 2022 along with the peer to peer advocacy, workshops, Lager visits and Lager Audio reports, BIG initiated the “BIG Skills Development Project” a new  project focusing on Empowerment strategies: Each and every individual woman of the group  is developing, organizing and implementing a project, supported by the whole group. In a collective participation in these projects and self organization the women engage to build a movement from the grassroots, embrace self care as well as nurture leadership and skills development. These projects focus on community building and are funded through Alliance for Gender Equality in Europe (AGEE), FILIA-Die Frauenstiftung and MONOM in addition to continuous advisory support from Quartiermeister.

Projects include production and distribution of home made natural hair oil, social dancing, make-up tutorials, baking and Pastry, food production through vegetable gardening, celebrating multicultural diversity, feeding the street families with a warm meal at least once a month and embracing a culture of community structural support.