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.