For Hope and a Future

This year’s Global Leadership Team Meeting will focus on the new LWF World Service Strategy. Seeing the high number of conflicts, often exacerbated by natural disaster worldwide, discussions will center around how to best serve people in need. 

Looking for peace together 

For 40 years, LWF Central America has been working in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. There, common threats to vulnerable populations include limited, fragmented economic growth; forced and voluntary migration; continued violation of basic human rights; militarization and insecurity; and natural disasters. In 2021, LWF Central America supported more than 29,000 people including different projects in response to COVID-19. 

On 24 October 2023, the program will celebrate 40 years of work. On this occasion, the LWF General Secretary Rev. Dr Anne Burghardt will visit the program. 

Through its humanitarian and development arm World Service, LWF serves 3.5 million people in need in 28 countries world wide.

The meeting brings together the management teams of the LWF country programs, as well as LWF headquarters in Geneva, to discuss best practices, contextual challenges and other aspects of their joint work for Hope and a Future.

Strengthen community and organizational resilience in Asia

This meeting will focus on building resilience, in the communities we serve and the required resilient organizational setup.

In the region where LWF works, people of concern are often marginalized because of a lack of protection and social cohesion, access to services and livelihood opportunities.

We seek to prevent the effects of poverty and injustice by building long-term resilience. During the meeting we aim to unpack the community resilience approaches for the communities we serve, through sharing experiences, best practices and future strategic directions in the Asian Context.

Together with the Management Teams from Geneva, Myanmar, Nepal, Bangladesh, and other LWF experts, we focus the first two days on programmatic and organizational aspects.

On the third day we have invited several strategic partners, to further discuss specifics around community and organizational resilience.

Webinar on preventing sexual and gender-based violence in the context of forced migration

There are over 100 million forcibly displaced people in the world today, around half of whom are women and girls. Religion, faith and spirituality are often an integral part of the forced migration experience, shaping people’s resilience and vulnerability.

In crises, people turn to religion for meaning and relief from anxiety, yet religion can be also a source of discrimination and disadvantage. Religious actors are often the first respondents to crises, but the secular frameworks of protection from GBV often exclude their engagement.

The webinar seeks to explore how religious engagement in protection from GBV in forced displacement could be strengthened. It provides a platform to exchange experiences and lessons learnt among faith and secular actors in relation to protection from GBV against forced migrants. The discussions will help build evidence of the role of faith actors in responding to GBV in displacement emergencies and to co-develop recommendations on how to work with religious actors to support responses to GBV in forced migration.

This event is part of a multi-stakeholder collaborative process including Act Alliance, SVRI-JLI Religion & GBV Hub, Religions for Peace, LWF, IRW, HIAS, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent, Faith to Action Network, Side by Side Movement and the University of Birmingham.

The Global Management Team’s Meeting brings together DWS country management teams - Finance Coordinators, Program Coordinator and Country Directors - to take a joint look at critical issues related to daily DWS programmatic and managerial work.

The meeting will include training workshops, simulation exercises and sharing of experiences.

Event language:  English