Disclaimer: One can only speak from where one stands. These reflections are about where power sits in humanitarian work, and where I believe it should move: closer to communities themselves. But I write from the vantage point of an outsider practitioner, trying to make sense of what solidarity means and of my own place within humanitarian work. 

In 2019, I moved to Dzaleka Refugee Camp in Malawi with my husband and our two young children to support a new education initiative sponsored by a Brazilian NGO called Fraternidade Sem Fronteiras. The initiative itself had begun with four young refugees who dreamed of ensuring that every refugee child in Dzaleka could access a quality education despite the constraints of camp life. I understood this as an opportunity to live out the principle of what solidarity truly means: transforming reality together. 

I soon learned that living out the ethics of solidarity required much more than my good intentions. It required resisting a system whose everyday practices continue to privilege doing for communities (a charity mindset) rather than with them (a mutual responsibility mindset). What I saw repeatedly was that this type of exclusion—not uncommon to the most well-intended efforts—implied sidelining the most important factor for meaningful humanitarian and development work: contextual knowledge.

If meaningful humanitarian work depends on contextual knowledge, then practitioners need ways of staying close enough to learn from it. But proximity only matters if it creates space for meaningful participation by those most affected, who are often the ones with the least power. Over time, meaningful participation begins to change who leads and who makes decisions. And for that to happen consistently, organizations need enough flexibility to learn and adapt. Looking back, I came to see these not as separate ideas, but as different expressions of the same commitment to solidarity. 

Talking about it in abstract is something the system does well. This reflection is less about offering a recipe than about grounding these ideas in lived experience. 

Where It Began 

I can’t pinpoint when my appetite for social justice began, but I know I owe much of it to my mother. When she started her undergraduate studies in Education, I was around 11. Her academic journey spilled over onto me, introducing me to Brazilian thinkers like Paulo Freire and Florestan Fernandes. Brazil has a strong tradition of public intellectuals committed to social change. Years later, after some detours, I followed in my mother’s footsteps to become an educator.

Harvesting with neighbors and friends in a community garden.

Then came motherhood, which profoundly shifted how I understood both education and my place in the world. My husband and I strived to involve our own children in our search for purposeful ways to show up for children beyond our own. When our first child was five and our second just one, we moved to Malawi. Moving from the education context I knew in Brazil into an international, crisis-affected setting humbled me. Working in education could mean something very different, even when guided by the same aspiration of “leaving no child behind.”

The shift came with new challenges and complex ethical questions. To make sense of it, I returned to Freire.

Freire is known for framing education as a path to critical consciousness and liberation of oppressed peoples. In the 1970s, he was invited by Guinea-Bissau’s government to help rebuild its education system after independence from Portuguese rule. In his book, Letters to Guine-Bissau, he wrote:

“Authentic help (…) is that in which those involved assist one another, growing together through the shared effort of understanding the reality they seek to transform.“

Weekly meeting at Ubuntu Nation School.

I felt uncomfortable being treated as “the expert.” Working alongside refugee and Malawian educators, I quickly saw that the expertise that mattered most in making our work meaningful was contextual and deeply attuned to the realities of that specific community—and, for obvious reasons, I did not hold that knowledge. I did have things to contribute, and I don’t mean to underplay that. But international expertise needs to find its place in ways that complement, rather than replace, the expertise of communities. 

Years later, while doing my Rotary Peace Fellowship at Duke University, I read Séverine Autesserre’s Peaceland. The book helped me see that many of the tensions I had experienced were not isolated, but part of broader patterns in humanitarian practice: how the smallest routines of humanitarians—from security protocols to social habits—can mirror the larger structures that distance practitioners from communities, reinforcing unequal relationships of knowledge and power. 

Freire had taught me why contextual knowledge and equitable relationships matter. Autesserre helped me understand why humanitarian systems often fail to create the conditions for them.

Seeing Power

Being “new” to the sector gave me an unexpected advantage: I didn’t assume I had the answers. I hoped to learn from and with the community. Over time, however, I realized that the humanitarian system was not always organized in ways that made this easy. Even the idea of “local” became complicated. In a refugee camp, “local” rarely includes the refugees themselves. 

In that particular context, power differences became very visible in the near silence around—and sidelining of—the work and leadership refugees had already built themselves. The breadth of community-led work was impressive. In nearly every sector, refugee-led initiatives were solving problems with virtually no funding. How could such efforts be so overlooked by a system designed to respond to these challenges? 

Something that deeply troubled me was realizing that when refugees leading meaningful work in their community became involved in the more formal humanitarian system—usually through “volunteer” arrangements as so-called “incentive workers”—this rarely meant strengthening their collective projects. The system created a painful paradox: it gave individuals an alternative to total economic marginalization, but it also reinforced the idea that refugee leadership could only be recognized within roles defined by the humanitarian system itself. 

As someone who hired refugees as incentive workers, I lived that paradox firsthand. As is often the case when working within complex systems, my ability to change the larger structures was limited. Beyond advocating for better economic incentives, there was little room to challenge the macro-structures that sustained these constraints: a national policy that kept refugees outside the formal employment system and an international system that depended heavily on refugee labor to be able to “do more with less”.

Recognizing those constraints did not mean I had no agency. It pushed me to look more carefully at the space I did have to act. Some of that space depended on how I chose to live and relate to the community. Some depended on the type of organization I worked for. Beneath both was a deeper question: whose knowledge counts, who gets to participate, and where should decisions ultimately reside? 

Individual and Family Level

If contextual knowledge was the foundation of meaningful work, then proximity became more than a logistical decision. Living inside the camp changed profoundly how I came to know and relate to the community. While many aspects of international work inevitably created distance between practitioners and communities, my family and I experienced a different reality. We lived on the school compound, at the edge of the refugee camp. That made me a neighbor to the children, educators, and other community members I worked alongside, with virtually all the features of what being neighbors in a collectivist community means. 

I wasn’t commuting in and out. I lived there and witnessed the struggles of camp life in real time. Relationships grew organically. I was part of both joyful and sorrowful community moments. My social life mostly happened around Dzaleka. My kids made friends, learned the language, and joined community life. I became pregnant with my third child while living there, and we named our son Amani (peace in Kiswahili), in honor of the journey we were on.

Physical proximity did not make me less of an outsider. Nor did it automatically produce better humanitarian practice. What it did was expose me to countless conversations, relationships, and everyday realities that would have been much harder to perceive from a distance. It also allowed others to see me beyond my “humanitarian” role, as a neighbor, mother, and person learning alongside them. That, too, supported a gradual process of trust-building. 

In this sense, time was a key factor. When our planned departure came in 2021, we extended our stay. The more time I spent there, the more I was able to understand the nuances of the context. The more I witnessed the injustices and burdens refugees endured, the harder it became to see them as someone else’s struggle. 

That individual decision had a practical impact on the work as well. In education, especially within the context of protracted displacement and multiple layers of vulnerability, meaningful change cannot be rushed. Children navigating trauma are often supported by adults who carry their own scars. I saw signs of lasting change begin to emerge only after four to five years. Continuity mattered—for coherence, for memory, and, above all, for trust. 

Organizational Level

Proximity alone, however, changes very little if organizations are not designed to learn from it. Among the organizational features that supported learning and adaptation in my context, the most important one was flexibility. Flexibility came from multiple sources and manifested itself in different ways. The first, and perhaps most important given that we were operating a school, was the freedom to build our educational program alongside the community. 

From curriculum development, to sourcing educational materials, to planning for

Teacher training activity with educators from Ubuntu Nation School.

operations, decisions were made together with refugee and Malawian educators and school leaders. This process of co-creation influenced not only classroom practices but also broader program priorities. Our teacher development program, which eventually became a cornerstone of our work within our own school and with other refugee-led and government schools in and around the camp, was fundamentally shaped by that process. 

The organization’s decentralized model gave me space to move beyond consultation and promote more participatory forms of leadership and keep decisions close to those most affected by them. In practice, this meant that a group of around 15 community-based professionals met every week to raise concerns, reflect on challenges and opportunities, brainstorm ideas, and make both strategic and operational decisions. It also meant close collaboration with parents from the school community, who formed a strong parent-teacher organization and contributed through leadership, ideas, and active involvement in school life.

Another important source of flexibility was the way our work was funded. Our initiative was not structured as a short-term project with a fixed cycle. Our funding model was sustained primarily by micro-sponsoring: thousands of individuals contributing regularly with small amounts of money. Many of these individuals could barely be called sponsors; they acted more like ambassadors of the cause, taking their own initiative to sustain and multiply support. That made us less vulnerable to the sudden end of large funding streams and gave us steadier income, which allowed us to plan for the long run and adapt as the work evolved.

And that was critical for the type of work we were doing. Despite operating in a humanitarian context, our work had strong development dimensions. It was an ongoing endeavor that grew roots in the community. The challenge was not only to sustain the school operations year after year, but also to expand a new grade level every year so that children could continue their full schooling journey with us. 

Funding flexibility also meant we could innovate and experiment. Operating in a context marked by inflation, supply shortages, and price fluctuations pushed us to think more intentionally about sustainability. Initiatives were launched to enable us to produce our own food, our own cooking fuel (bio-charcoal), our own soap. Over time, other initiatives were developed to generate income for the organization’s projects. 

Beyond my role, I tried to use the relationships and networks available to me to broker connections between refugee-led initiatives and international supporters. I saw these not as charity, but as opportunities to strengthen ideas that had already emerged within the community: a group of yoga teachers who secured support to build a yoga center; a group of poets who found supporters to finance the publication of their poetry books; a group of families who received support to develop community gardens; and so on.  

It wasn’t perfect. Working within the framework of an international organization meant power was still centralized elsewhere. Looking back, I believe we could have been more radical in shifting power and allowing community leadership to shape the organization more deeply. Still, within our scope, we challenged top-down management in meaningful ways, and that changed relationships and expanded our sense of what was possible. 

At the Level of Principles and Commitment

What principle justifies organizing humanitarian work this way? 

My boss at Fraternidade, Clarissa Paz, would often say that we cannot operate from a mindset of competition while working in the business of providing assistance to human beings. The measure of our strength should be our ability to connect with one another and work together.

That idea matters because it shifts our attention away from organizations themselves—their programs, resources, and visibility—and back toward the people and communities we aim to serve. All humanitarian work begins with a strong “why”: the belief that helping others in moments of vulnerability is the humane thing to do. But having a strong “why” is not enough. If contextual knowledge is essential, then solidarity cannot be only about the willingness to “help.” It also has to shape the way we organize relationships, roles, and decisions. That’s the how. At the end of the day, solidarity sits at the intersection of a strong sense of why and a solid ethical how. 

Maybe this is what Freire meant by authentic help: not replacing people’s agency with our expertise, but creating the conditions for their knowledge to guide what we do together. 

That is why the individual, organizational, and ethical dimensions cannot be separated. My own proximity to the community mattered, but only because it helped me listen and learn differently. Meaningful participation mattered because it created space for that knowledge to influence the work. Shared leadership mattered because it began to move decisions closer to those affected by them. And flexibility mattered because, without it, even the best intentions can remain stuck in ways of working that keep distance in place. 

And this distance is exactly what I learned to pay attention to. It is not only created by policies or decisions made far away. It is also created through everyday practices: how we relate to others, the unspoken rules we follow, and the attitudes of those representing “the system.” 

Today, I understand solidarity less as helping others and more as paying attention to where knowledge, participation, and decisions are held.

For me, living solidarity begins there.