Purpose:
Barka creates opportunities to return home for people facing homelessness or difficult social and economic situation, and they run a Social Economy Centre, supporting migrants on their way to economic and social rehabilitation and integration within the receiving country.
Stimulus/Rationale:
In the autumn 2011 a group of long-term homeless Polish vagrants had teamed up with rejected Somali asylum seekers to build a tent camp close to the suburbs of Utrecht. When city officials heard rumours of vigilante patrols with baseball bats, knives and even shotguns, they reached out to the organisation “Barka” as they had previously dealt with similar situations successfully.
Process:
Barka was founded by a Polish psychologist, Thomasz Sadowski with long term experience in psychiatric clinics and detention centres. In 2012 a first Barka 'outreach' team started work in Utrecht, hired by the local government. The Barka philosophy shows a subtle mix of former ideology and modern psychology. Barka doesn’t use the negative word 'return' but a better one, 'reconnection'. If someone fails to adapt to a new country, he may need to be reconnected to his country of origin, and this is exactly what Barka does. Some of those supported through Barka’s Leaders Approach programme, have become leaders themselves and are employed in projects run by Barka foundations across several countries or have initiated their own associations and are supporting others.
Impact:
Since the Polish team started working in Utrecht, Barka 'reconnected' almost 400 people to their families or Barka communities in Poland. Among them heavily addicted men, victims of trafficking and psychiatric patients, lost in limbo.
Thomasz Sadowski is now working, together with African organisations, on starting social economy and integration projects based on Barka’s experiences and models in African countries that are, like Poland was, on their way to a new political and social reality.
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