Bridging
The Gap (BTG)

The Bridging the Gaps project resulted from work that ARCC has done since our organisation’s founding 17 years ago. ARCC has worked for many years supporting the resettled community and forced migrant families, working with the agencies that support us, and dealing with the policies and systems that we all work within. While much works well, there are still critical gaps in the resettlement process. ARCC has designed a robust project; preliminary work was completed in early 2020 to review the in-house material and conduct a literature search. This work was presented to the ARCC Governance Board for consideration of a multi-year project. The Board gave the green light to the project manager (ARCC-CEO) to start the initiative, with assistance from an external Advisory Steering Group, and launched a funding application to the Tindall Foundation.

BtG aims to provide ARCC and the resettlement sector with information that can be used to shift how the resettlement process operates, in a positive and productive way. More importantly, the project is solution-focused and therefore intends to improve the systems, attitudes and mindsets of both providers and recipients within the resettlement process. Bridging the Gap was designed as a three-year listening, engagement, and participatory action research project.

The purpose is to identify gaps in the resettlement process, based on the lived experiences of families and community representatives, in order to determine a forced migrant perspective of the system. From there, the project would develop and promote SOLUTIONS that can effectively create change. ARCC takes a new approach to bridge these gaps by starting at the flax roots, deriving the real needs and practical solutions from the lived experiences of those who must navigate these systems.