About Same Skies Charitable Organisation

Same Skies is a non-religious, politically neutral non-profit organisation, registered in Switzerland (2014), Australia (2016), Malaysia and Indonesia (2017). We are a multidisciplinary and multicultural team of people who believe that through compassion and combined action, we can create a better world.

We want to drive leadership and innovation in refugee assistance and protection to improve efficiency, effectiveness, quality and social outcomes. Same Skies’ innovation is best described through its perception of refugees and asylum seekers1, who are traditionally seen as vulnerable. Same Skies refers to “capacity-strengthening”, rather than “capacity-building” because we acknowledge an existing base of capability in every community.

Our work is based on the conviction that every individual has skills, knowledge and experiences to contribute to society. We focus on the resilience of refugees, rather than seeing them as vulnerable. This paradigm shift has a very significant, transformative impact on people’s lives when it is applied throughout every step of project cycle management.

We stand for Refugee-Led Action - a community-based approach emphasising strengths, resilience and access to human rights. Actors from within the refugee community (hereafter “community actors”) take ownership, conceiving, designing, implementing, and evaluating their own initiatives.

We work in line with the Action Commitments of the World Humanitarian Summit 2016. We are dedicated to contributing to the Core Responsibility 3 of "Leaving No One Behind" and to a Shift towards more investment into local capacities as per the Humanity Agenda, by reducing vulnerability and increasing the self-reliance and resilience of refugees and host communities. Protection should be about collectively creating an environment that allows everyone to claim his/her rights.

 

Our Vision: Refugees & asylum seekers in transit live with self-determination & dignity.