Giving Compass' Take:
- The Lotus Flower is a small UK-based nonprofit that helps displaced refugee women and girls by offering economic opportunities via skills training.
- Women are often the target of sexual violence and can experience unbelievable trauma. How does this mission help empower and activate hope for these displaced women? How can donors contribute to this mission?
- Read about supporting female refugee leaders.
What is Giving Compass?
We connect donors to learning resources and ways to support community-led solutions. Learn more about us.
Taban Shoresh is the founder of the Lotus Flower, a small UK-based nonprofit having a huge impact on the lives of displaced and refugee women and girls who have survived persecution and sexual violence under ISIS in Iraq.
In 2014, ISIS militants began to take over swathes of regions and cities in Iraq, including capturing Mosel, its second-most populous city. They targeted the non-Muslim ethnic miniority the Yazidis, who are mostly Kurdish, committing masscacres and abducting women who were raped and bought and sold as slaves.
Shoresh spoke to Global Citizen about the work being done by her organisation, and her life-changing decision to leave her finance job in the City of London to work on the frontlines of a humanitarian crisis.
The Lotus Flower team teaches useful skills, such as sewing, baking, and boxing, to the women living in four camps in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq and the Dohuk governorate, where Shoresh was born before coming to the UK as a refugee herself.
The Lotus Flower organises everything to get the businesses up and running, from helping the women sort out the accounting, to setting up a space to run it from, but from there the women develop the businesses themselves.
Read the full article about helping displaced women and refugees by Helen Lock at Global Citizen.