How It StartedWhen I joined Youth Voices Community in 2019, it was a small but determined group of refugee youth in Nairobi with a clear conviction: that refugee communities had the c...
How It Started
When I joined Youth Voices Community in 2019, it was a small but determined group of refugee youth in Nairobi with a clear conviction: that refugee communities had the capacity, creativity, and right to advocate for themselves. I was not coming in as an outsider with answers. I was coming in as someone who had lived the same reality a refugee who had faced the same bureaucratic walls, the same invisibility, the same assumption that someone else should speak on my behalf. That shared experience was not incidental. It was the foundation of everything we built together.
What We Built
Over five years, Youth Voices Community grew from a grassroots advocacy group into one of Kenya's most recognised refugee-led organisations. We developed youth advocacy programmes that trained over two hundred refugee leaders in how to engage with government, media, and international stakeholders. We built partnerships with funders who were willing to trust community-led approaches. We produced research, policy briefs, and public communications that shifted how refugee self-reliance was understood not as a donor metric but as a lived practice. None of this happened quickly. All of it required patience, trust, and a willingness to learn from failure.
The Lessons That Surprised Me
Leadership in a refugee-led organisation is fundamentally different from leadership in a traditional NGO. The communities you serve are also the communities you belong to. That closeness is your greatest strength but it also means that every decision carries a weight that outsiders rarely feel. I learned that the most important skill is not strategy or communication but listening. Not the performative listening of consultation processes, but the deep, slow listening that happens when you sit with people over time and genuinely understand what they need not what the funding landscape says they should need.
On the Tension Between Growth and Integrity
As YVC grew, we faced a challenge that every successful community organisation eventually confronts: the pressure to become what the system wants you to be rather than what your community needs you to be. Funders wanted scale. Governments wanted compliance. International partners wanted replicable models. But the communities we served needed something more local, more responsive, more human. Navigating that tension growing the organisation without losing its soul was the hardest leadership challenge I have faced. The answer, I learned, is never to let the organisation's survival become more important than its purpose.
What I Carry Forward
I left the Executive Director role in 2024, but Youth Voices Community did not leave me. Everything I now do at R-SEAT, every advocacy strategy I design, every conversation I have with funders or policymakers, is shaped by what I learned in those five years. I carry forward a deep belief in community ownership that the people most affected by a problem are always the most capable of solving it, if given the resources and space to do so. I carry forward a healthy scepticism of institutional promises that are not backed by structural change. And I carry forward the memory of hundreds of young refugees who showed me, every single day, what leadership really looks like.
