CRP: Emergency Security Initiative

Samer Kurdi is the Director of Emergency Assistance for Collateral Repair Project.  Samer began volunteering with Collateral Repair Project (CRP) in 2014 after returning  to Jordan from the United States. His extensive IT and data management background saw him as the right person to advise and help build CRP's website and data infrastructure.  Samer joined the CRP as a  staff member in 2017. He manages CRP’s Emergency Assistance program which distributes nearly $400,000 annually in cash assistance and food-vouchers to the most vulnerable families affiliated with Collateral Repair Project.   Samer received his undergraduate degree and MBA from Boston University. At CRP he manages both the Emergency Assistance team and the Data & IT Team,  managing the daily work of about 10 staff members as well as volunteers. 

In cooperation with local grocery retailers, CRP has been working since March 2020 to make credit available to impoverished families so that they can purchase food staples since the coronavirus pandemic brought about national quarantine in Jordan.  

CRP’s mission is to assist the most vulnerable with their basic needs and also provide opportunities to build community, achieve personal growth, and heal. We do this by actively engaging the community and creating programs based on identified needs. 

CRP’s food voucher program is a lifeline for the most vulnerable members of our community in Amman. The lock-down and collapse of the local economy is making times hard for many people in Jordan, but refugees are particularly badly affected. 

According to UNHCR, at the end of 2019, 744,795 refugees were registered in Jordan. While nearly 90% of the refugees are Syrians, there are also significant populations of Iraqis, Yemenis, Sudanese and other nationalities. These non-Syrian refugees  make up about one third of Amman’s total refugee population of 270,000. The majority of international funding has been directed to refugees living in—or close to—refugee camps. This is changing, but refugees—and particularly minority refugees—living in East Amman are amongst the most neglected.  

CRP provides in kind basic needs support and food vouchers to the most vulnerable. Sources of support for humanitarian programming in Jordan, primarily for the Syrian refugee crisis, waned throughout 2019 and many international organizations have left Jordan.   CRP spent $435,000 to run its Emergency Assistance program in 2019 to distribute nearly 8,000 food vouchers to vulnerable community members.  

Since March 2020, CRP has responded to the very real need of the most marginalized families, pushed into deep food insecurity in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Thanks to the compassion of our institutional partners and individual donors, CRP has been able to continue providing emergency support at a time when many NGOs in Amman have suspended their operations. 

With no access to work (formal or informal) and limited access to public services, refugees are struggling more to meet their basic needs as families have many ongoing financial obligations. CRP is receiving an increasing number of calls from families who can’t access any food or assistance and don’t know where else to turn for help. For families that are registered with CRP and have already been assessed for need, this intervention to provide food vouchers will at least help to lessen one source of anxiety: “how will we put food on the table?”.  

Through a local partnership with community supermarkets, beneficiaries can use their vouchers to purchase what their families need most.  CRP has a trusted working relationship with two grocer retailers that have excellent capacity to deliver to homebound beneficiaries and they give CRP’s beneficiaries  a small discount on their purchases because CRP is a reliable partner.  Our grocery partners  are respected by the community and familiar with CRP’s procedures for food vouchers. 

Since April of 2020 CRP is providing monthly food vouchers to nearly 900  families and we have secure funding for this initiative through August 2020.  

The food vouchers help the local economy by supporting local small retailers. In this context, CRP currently has partnerships with two locally-owned small supermarkets in East Amman where refugees can purchase a wide variety of commodities using the vouchers. The food vouchers lift some of the burden and stress from vulnerable families and give them improved food security.  It gives them the modest resources to engage in reciprocal hospitality within their social networks (sharing a meal, inviting the neighbor over for tea) which add up to stronger communities that have stronger social bonds and more capacity to take care of each other. In the longer term it enables refugees to find connections and supports their healing from emotional traumas. 

Refugees are the most vulnerable people and always find it difficult to access basic needs and services.  With the pandemic and Jordan's strict lockdown laws, these people have been barred from work and their ability to provide for their families has halted and led to food insecurity.  The emergency food voucher program ensures that these families are able to purchase their basic needs.  This enables families to purchase food without shame, whilst also finding support and strengthening their local ties.  

When the restrictions ease, CRP will reopen its two community centers, where we run a robust variety of programs

The CRP food voucher program is a longstanding program that has been running since 2014. CRP has been serving the urban refugee community in East Amman since its founding in 2006.  

The value of each food voucher depends on the size of the family, but the average family of five receives JD 40 ($56)  a month.  The food voucher enables them to purchase what the family needs from the selection of food and non-food items that are sold by the two partner retailers.   Typically, families choose to buy fresh fruit and vegetables as well as staples such as flour, sugar, pulses and powdered milk. The food voucher may also be used for non-food items, such as soap.  Neither grocery vendor sells tobacco.   

In our work we are approached by families in desperate need.  The social support system in Jordan does not extend far enough to help these disenfranchised communities of refugees and people displaced by war and conflict.  The actual assistance we can give is limited but over the years we have seen over and over again how food assistance gives  some hope and some stability to families in crisis, and that when they take advantage of the free resources and programs that are offered at CRP’s two community centers they have less stress, more hope, and are better able to resolve conflict, manage trauma, and plan for the future.

Emergency assistance project is a response to the specific circumstances surrounding the pandemic, however CRP has been running a basic-needs assistance program since 2014. This emergency program draws on the experience of the team and the existing infrastructure for delivery.  

CRP strives to provide short-term assistance in the form of food vouchers to vulnerable refugee and Jordanian families living in Amman who are negatively affected by the economic constriction that results from the pandemic. 

CRP’s food voucher program is a lifeline for the most vulnerable members of our community in Amman. CRP has a track record of grass-roots community building and emergency assistance provision in East Amman.  CRP has an active database of about 6,500 families that engage with our programs and the majority of them are refugees or have been displaced to Jordan because of conflict in their home countries, although CRP’s programs also serve members of the host Jordanian community and social cohesion between refugees and the host community is our goal.  

We want to respond to the very real and pressing need of the most marginalized families who have been pushed into deep food insecurity due to COVID-19 pandemic. Food aid will be combined with CRP’s ongoing telephone and online protection, psycho-social, and educational support until our community centers are able to open again. An anti-discriminatory approach and deep ties with minority communities in East Amman allow us to reach Amman’s most vulnerable populations.

In the future, CRP will continue its food voucher program for the most vulnerable but will seek also to build on the valuable assets we have in our community centers to provide economic empowerment through skills training, revenue generating activities, and new ventures in the arena of social entrepreneurship.  

Samer harnessed his technical background and skills to upgrade the data collection and analysis capacity of Collateral Repair Project, and he has personally mentored more than 10 student data scientists since 2017 through local Jordanian and also American student internship programs such as MENAR Fellowship and the SALT Program. 

Samer Kurdi worked closely with counterparts in the Mennonite Central Committee in 2017 and  2018 to upgrade CRP’s capacity to evaluate individuals and families who approach us for emergency assistance according to a quantitative scale based on the model developed by the World Food Program to measure vulnerability and reliance on negative coping mechanisms.    In parallel, he and colleagues developed new data management systems to enable CRP to record, track, and analyze increasing volumes of information that the Emergency Assistance team was collecting during home visits where they used tablets to capture and immediately upload information using software that was developed in-house.  Later, Samer and others in the Data team worked with the US based Pro Bono analytics to do more sophisticated analysis of this data and better segment the communities CRP is serving and to inform difficult decisions about how to apportion scarce resources based on data driven decision making.  

Collateral Repair Project 

The Jordanian Government has made a strong response to the coronavirus threat including closing all non-essential businesses and forbidding citizens to leave their houses. The curfew in place has restricted movement to be only between 10 am and 6 pm, during which time certain food and medicine delivery services may operate vehicles. People can go out (respecting social distancing) to patronize small, local grocers only on foot.

The lock-down and suppression of the local economy is making times hard for many people in Jordan, but refugees are particularly badly affected.  Jordan hosts nearly 747,000 refugees, 78% of whom live below the poverty line. Even before the current pandemic, the Jordanian government has struggled to meet the needs of the refugee and local Jordanian population. Many refugees have never been able to legally work, and their food insecurity is a significant concern. Most families must make hard choices between paying rent, seeking medical care, and feeding their children. In order to pay their bills, many refugees are forced into debt, or seek out exploitative or dangerous work in the informal economy. 

This intervention most directly addresses sustainable development goals (SDGs): End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.  By engaging participants in CRP’s other community centre projects this intervention indirectly contributes to SDGs.

The use of food vouchers helps the local economy by supporting local small- and medium-scale producers and retailers. In this context, CRP currently has partnerships with two locally-owned small supermarkets in East Amman (one near our center in Hashemi Shamali, and one in the neighborhood of Ashrafieh, where most of our Sudanese beneficiaries live) where refugees can purchase a wide variety of commodities using the vouchers. 

Building resilience in the community is at the heart of CRP’s mission. Although families may need emergency assistance in extreme circumstances, such as created by the Covid-19 pandemic, CRP community centers also deliver free programming which provides skill building, develops leadership,  and supports emotional wellness and resilience in individuals. 

All of the  families receiving food vouchers are actively encouraged to take part in other CRP community centre programs. Our programming includes vocational skills courses, women’s economic empowerment projects, English classes, after-school club, daycare, and several leadership and wellness programs for both adults and children.  

CRP’s goal in 2020 is to be able to give sustaining monthly support equivalent to about $55 a month for the average family to 900 families.  

CRP employs assessment tools developed in-house to conduct needs assessments that measure food security and coping mechanisms via interviews and home visits. These are adapted from  the World Food Programme’s Food Consumption Score Index (FCS) and reduced Coping Strategies Index (rCSI). Reassessments at later stages determine the outcomes of this program. As of the end of FY 2018-2019, re-assessments revealed a 75.8% increase in food security and a 25.2% decrease in negative coping mechanisms in the families who received emergency assistance from CRP.  

Our goals for 2021 are to help the communities we serve to remain resilient in the wake of the economic and social disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic.  In 2021 we will work within the limits of health and safety regulations to reopen our community centers and resume the range of psychosocial, skill building, and wellness programs that improve the well being of thousands of vulnerable refugee families in impoverished Ease Amman.  In 2021 we want to continue the emergency assistance program to be a resource to the most needy in our community. 

Within the next five years, we want to develop our community centers to become an even greater resource for the neighborhoods they serve.  We want to expand our economic empowerment activities and develop the capacity to develop and manage income generating activities that will benefit our community and also help us to sustain the operating costs of our community centers in Amman.  

The challenge of securing sustained sources of funding for our basic operating expenses is a barrier to our ambitions for growth.  The legal environment regulating the NGO sector in Jordan can be affected by sudden implementation of new regulations  and this can become a barrier in the future. 

To secure sustained funding sources we maintain our efforts and fundraising from individuals and organizations and, in the future, hope to experiment with models of social entrepreneurship that will allow us to become an organization that can deliver economic empowerment to our community.  

CRP does not currently have any formal legal partnerships with other organizations.  

We have recently submitted a proposal for an English language and IT remote learning program that, if it receives funding, would be implemented in partnership with the US NGO “Paper Airplanes.” CRP has a great deal of informal partnership with scholars and students affiliated with the University of Bath in the UK and with the University of Jordan.  

CRP is a US 501(c)(3) non-profit and we are registered in Jordan as an INGO with the Ministry of Social Development.  In Amman we have two community centers, one in Hashemi Shamali and the other in the Amman Downtown. We work as a community based organization where we offer education programs for children, programs for adults such as gender based violence awareness and prevention; nutrition awareness; English language instruction; and all kinds of health and wellness programs such as yoga, kick-boxing, and also mindfulness.    CRP has a special focus on the refugee communities living in deep poverty in Amman, and on building up social cohesion between refugee and host communities in the neighborhoods where we work.  As CRP is not a local NGO, we fundraise outside of Jordan.  60% of funding comes from individual donations and the remaining 40% is generated from project specific grants.  

Sustained donations and grant funding.  In the future we would like to pilot some social enterprise initiatives based in our community centers, primarily for the benefit of the community we serve but potentially also to generate revenue  enough to cover some of our  fundamental operating expenses.  

With the coronavirus situation that emerged in early 2020, in Jordan we went into a national lock down that began in the middle  of March.  CRP was one of the first NGOs in Amman that was able to get assistance to vulnerable community members during that lockdown.  We immediately began a special fundraising campaign to support our emergency assistance program for 4 months, to ensure that we could help as many people as possible in a time of great economic and social hardship and uncertainty. 

CRP succeeded in raising about $100,000 from foundations and partner charitable organizations, and this includes partners who allowed us to reallocate funding for programs that were interrupted by the lockdown to instead support the emergency assistance efforts. 

CRP prioritises the emergency assistance program and seeks to fund it via grants and also via fundraising from individual donors.  However, in Jordan  funding for humanitarian relief has become less and less available as the global attention on the Syrian refugee crisis waned in 2018 and 2019.  

CRP has a dedicated team of staff, supported by unpaid volunteers, including some who focus on donor relations and communications, program reporting, grant writing, and seeking out strategic partnerships. It is through their ongoing efforts that CRP has  been able to raise money in the past and will continue to do so in the future.  

We estimate that our expenses in 2020 will be at about the level of 2019 at $1 million, with 40% allocated to the Emergency Assistance program and food vouchers; another 40% allocated to community center activities and staff salaries; and the remaining 20% spent on marketing and donor relations, overheads and administration costs. 

Our community centers closed along with government instructions in response to the coronavirus threat between March and July of 2020, however all staff remained working remotely and they managed to move most ongoing programs to online platforms although a major barrier has been that many of the people we serve either don’t have internet enabled devices such as smart phones or computers, and/or can’t afford to pay for internet subscription  in the home or through their smartphones.  

CRP is interested to partner with organizations with interests and priorities that align with the work we are doing in Amman, Jordan. 

We are a data driven organization but have limited resources in terms of access to software, hardware and data storage solutions, and we also struggle to find and retain qualified team members with strong data science backgrounds.  

We  know our food  assistance and cash assistance programs are a lifeline to the most vulnerable families in our community, but we also acknowledge that it is not a long term solution.  Looking ahead to the future, we want to raise our capacity to pilot social enterprise programs through our center that will give our community members the tools, training, and mentoring to become more economically self-sustaining.

Our organization needs support both  in terms of funding so that we can carry the emergency assistance program forward in the future and also needs support in terms of data management  and this is not only staff with necessary skills but also data storage solutions and software  subscriptions flexible enough to accommodate the needs of Collateral Repair Project and  its current and anticipated future growth.  We would like to greatly enhance our monitoring evaluation and learning efforts and seek partnership with organizations interested in data management for social science and social work applications.