RCT Refugee Workforce Development Program

Globalization, characterized by the free movement of goods, services, and capital, has largely excluded marginalized groups such as refugees, asylum seekers, and displaced persons from its benefits. Unlike their counterparts in the Global North, these communities face significant barriers to achieving their professional and economic potential. According to UNHCR, 117.3 million people were forcibly displaced by the end of 2023 due to persecution, conflict, and human rights violations. By April 2024, this number is projected to surpass 120 million -- especially when considering climate change. Many displaced individuals lack legal status, work permits, and essential documentation, preventing them from fully contributing their skills to the global economy.

As a language services organization, we frequently encounter humanitarian crises where interpreters for marginalized languages are urgently needed. Recognizing this, we have a dedicated team member focused on recruiting interpreters and translators proficient in these languages. Our solution seeks to create meaningful opportunities for displaced individuals to apply their linguistic and cultural expertise. By doing so, we aim to promote economic justice and strengthen workforce development efforts, enabling these individuals to build sustainable futures, while addressing a critical gap in global humanitarian response.

The tech infrastructure we have is the backbone of our workforce development program. We work from digital platforms and we employ cutting edge technology that allows us to provide scalable and efficient language services that also make a deep impact in humanitarian efforts. We use a combination of different technological platforms and software, such as Airtable (for our back-end data management and workflows), Softr, and Slack, among others. We recently unveiled our new portal, powered by Softr, that will create more streamlined workflows and internal processes. Our portal will provide us with the logistical capabilities to introduce new linguists by training them faster and being able to manage more of them. Our Softr portal will revolutionize the way we recruit, train, and manage our teams of linguists and translators. We are constantly evolving and constantly looking for digital tools that can help us contribute to our mission as a language service for humanitarian organizations, as well as a way for marginalized communities to gain systemic access to more employment opportunities and exposure to new technology. Our workforce will always be exposed to cutting edge technologies.

Our solution will serve marginalized communities – refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, people in movement anywhere they may be, and speakers of marginalized languages – looking for professional employment opportunities. Currently, these communities can face obstacles in leveraging their talent and in their human right to pursue professional development opportunities because of immigration laws preventing them from doing so. Furthermore, our solution also provides them with an avenue to secure dignified wages that may otherwise not be available to them. Our solution could be for a displaced Arabic speaker in the UAE, or Dari speakers in Pakistan, or Haitian Creole speakers in Mexico, or a Ukrainian refugee in the UK. Over the years, we’ve learned and confirmed that these communities are made up of supremely talented people who want to contribute to the world in which they live but are not able to due to archaic or unjust laws. What we offer them is an opportunity to work with a tech nonprofit that does not care about immigration statuses and will do everything in its power to ensure that people receive dignified wages for their work. Our Softr portal gives us the ability to scale our efforts to uplift these communities.

As a global nonprofit with team members across six continents, we are deeply connected to the communities we serve—refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants—regardless of where they are. Our team not only possesses the logistical expertise to deliver the solution effectively but also operates from a place of empathy and solidarity, driven by lived experiences. A key strength of our organization is the meaningful representation of displaced communities within our leadership structure. Several of our team leads and key linguists are individuals who have been forced to flee their home countries, including those from Ukraine, Afghanistan, Haiti, and the Middle East. Their firsthand understanding of the displacement journey informs every aspect of our solution's design and implementation.

We ensure that the voices of these communities guide our work at every stage. From initial needs assessments to solution iterations, we conduct regular engagements with the people we serve through team meetings, one-on-one meetings, community listening sessions, and collaborative workshops. Furthermore, while we are a completely remote organization, we try to meet in-person as often as we can within the reality of our operating budget, and we make it a goal to be strategic with our expenditures. 

Our approach is centered on co-creating solutions with the target population, ensuring that their ideas and priorities are reflected in both the design and implementation processes. Our community-driven model has not only enhanced service uptake but also fostered greater trust and resilience within vulnerable populations. By embedding their lived realities and insights into our work, we can expand our reach and impact, providing dignified and culturally responsive support at scale.

We unveiled our Softr portal in late 2024. We already have a wide network of linguists and translators who are refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, and other people in movement who work for our team. Moreover, we have a large number of linguists and translators in our pipeline who need to be vetted, evaluated and transitioned into our team. Currently, that process is primarily done manually -- over email that will allow vetted linguists to sign in and select language projects to work on – and be paid for it. Moreover, we already employ 200 linguists who are refugees, asylum seekers, or displaced in the countries where they live. We have been successful at incorporating these communities and helping them leverage their talents. Now, we simply need the resources to scale our capabilities and opportunities. Furthermore, we recently made investments so that one of our team members develops his coding and programming skills. 

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Our solution is aimed at providing professional opportunities to refugees/displaced people that would otherwise not be available to them due to legal and logistical factors. We also include speakers of marginalized languages. Globalization – the free movement of goods, services, and some people – has benefited certain regions, and certain people, more than others. That considered, we want to remove barriers that prohibit the economic integration of refugees/displaced people, and provide them with opportunities that allow them to reach their full potential. Moreover, our workforce development efforts also prioritize marginalized people (LGBTQ, indigenous communities, women, and other gender/sexual minorities) in countries with economic infrastructure that has been decimated, or people who do not have access to employment opportunities due to religious or cultural factors – countries like Yemen, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Venezuela, China, Kurdistan, etc. 

We leverage financial technology platforms, CRMs, communication technology, etc. to create an environment where these communities can benefit from 1. Professional employment opportunities that would otherwise not be available to them and 2. Access to dignified wages. 

There are similar efforts underway that seek to redefine the role of refugees, migrants, and other people in movement, in the global economy. Organizations like Talent Without Boundaries, the Tent Partnership for Refugees, Na’amal, etc. are looking to reframe the narrative concerning refugees and the value they bring to the global community. 

Our goal, as a language services provider and language justice organization, is to re-introduce the value and indispensability of a human translator in humanitarian, educational, and legal contexts in a world that is hurriedly introducing, and too hastily relying on, machine translation and AI in those efforts. By making larger investments in the development of digital tools and human capital, we can hire more refugees, asylum seekers, and other people in movement by scaling our efforts. 

The lack of translators within border agencies and broader systems is not due to a shortage of talent, but rather a matter of economic fairness and funding. Individuals proficient in multiple languages, particularly those speaking marginalized languages, are consistently undervalued or not compensated at all, and they are often denied opportunities for professional growth, despite the critical role translators play during humanitarian crises, emergency situations, and in everyday society. Our efforts focus on training programs and establishing sustainable income avenues for translators and interpreters impacted by systemic barriers. We advocate for a future where translators and interpreters are acknowledged, supported, and fairly compensated for their invaluable contributions. 

We currently employ approximately 200 people who are refugees, asylum seekers or other people in movement in about 20 countries. By investing in technology and human capital, we will be able to scale our efforts. For example, our portal will eliminate inefficiencies in our workflows. By investing in human capital (programming, data science, etc.), our ability to produce insightful statistics and reporting will improve, leading to more complete Monitoring and Evaluation processes. 

In 2022, the World Economic Forum launched its Refugee Employment Alliance. The Alliance was created to promote the socio-economic integration of refugees. There is a growing global consensus that refugees, migrants, asylum seekers, and other displaced people can not only fill labor shortages, but can contribute on various levels to companies and organizations. Currently, refugee labor is seen as untapped potential leading to a no-win situation for the refugee communities and the companies and organizations that would benefit from the hiring of refugees. 

For the reasons stated above, and others, we strongly believe in the positive impact of refugees, asylum seekers and other displaced people, and that by hiring more of them, we can change the narrative surrounding their productive value. 

We usually have approximately two people who are directly responsible for the workforce development program and approximately ten people who assist. 

All of the staff who assist with the workforce development program are full-time staff. 

We have been working on our solution from the moment Respond Crisis Translation was founded. However, we did not formalize and structure our program until mid 2022. 

Our organization is committed to diversity and inclusion at all levels. As an organization focused on protecting marginalized communities, it is intrinsic to our organizational identity that we promote diversity and inclusion at all levels. Furthermore, we actively seek to identify language disparities and barriers that we, in turn, address with an alternative language access model that focuses on human translators and trauma-informed interpretation and translation. 

Moreover, our organization was LGBTQ+ friendly from its inception. Our current leadership team has members of the LGBTQ+, immigrant, and refugee communities. 

Respond Crisis Translation provides rapid-response translation support on the frontlines of war, political unrest, climate disaster, and across any other system where language is a barrier to accessing safety and dignity. Our approach centers economic justice; we train, nurture, and build the capacity of translators and interpreters from crisis-impacted communities. We have created hundreds of translation and interpretation jobs for directly impacted community members. We have successfully supported thousands of refugees in accessing humanitarian parole, resettlement resources, and emergency frontline medical care. We actively partner with 475+ grassroots collectives, nonprofits, and aid organizations both during immediate crises and their aftermath. We have translated over 11,000 asylum applications and provided over 1 million minutes of oral interpreting on the frontlines. Lastly, we do all of the above by employing technology with a human focus. 

Over the past year, we have started to enhance our efforts to become an incubator of talent for displaced communities all over the world. Therefore, our social business model is one that primarily seeks to assist vulnerable communities while also being a source of income and professional development. 

In 2023, we were awarded a Twilio grant that provided us the opportunity to invest in our client portal. We made large investments in staff and consultants as the first step. We are currently in the process of implementing our client portal and we hope to have it fully operational by spring 2025. With an operational portal, we will be able to streamline our processes even further. Our goal is to hire 1-2 additional staff members to focus on technical aspects of our efforts, which will lead to the hiring of more linguists by mid 2025.