The End of Explore Adapt Renew: Reflecting on Three Years of Early Action, Local Ecosystems, and Centring Lived Experience

Together with our partners, we envisioned a future where refugees, asylum seekers and migrants have a voice in the asylum system, have access to justice and successfully rebuild their lives.

We are incredibly grateful to our core partners—Action Foundation, Bristol Refugee Rights, Brushstrokes, Nottingham Refugee Forum (NNRF), Positive Action for Refugees and Asylum Seekers (PAFRAS), Refugee Women Connect, and Southward Day Centre for Asylum Seekers (SDCAS). Their dedication, tenacity, and leadership have been pivotal in providing high-quality services, nurturing good practice, and driving systemic change in their local communities and at national level. A special thanks also goes to our digital partners and collaborators, CAST, SIDE Labs, Jamabuck, Noam Sohachesky, our training partners Lauren Maile-Wilson, Safer Foundation and Caplor Horizon and our evaluation team Jacob Warn and Tanya Murphy for supporting our innovation, build skills and scale good practice, and helping us measure and understand the impact of our work.

We also extend our heartfelt appreciation to everyone who has collaborated with us over the past three years, on early action service development, adapting services, co-production, facilitation skills, centering lived experience, strengthening local ecosystems, and prioritising wellbeing within our organisations.

We are immensely proud of the work we've accomplished and the positive changes we've made together. While the programme is coming to an end, the need for this work remains. We’re glad that the networks we've built want to stay connected, and we remain hopeful that the progress and changes we've achieved will continue beyond the life of the programme.

A special thank you goes to our funder, The National Lottery Community Fund, whose support made it possible for us to deliver a programme of such scale and impact.

Key Achievements:

• 19,915 asylum seekers and refugees accessed high-quality frontline services focused on prevention and crisis de-escalation within their communities.
• Strengthened 7 local ecosystems, fostering greater strategic collaboration, reducing service duplication, and ensuring that the user voice was central to service delivery planning and strategic influencing.
• 517 organisations have been engaged in collaborative spaces through the local partner networks. These include organisations forming local networks and  those attending local inter-organisation coordination meetings.
• 139 organisations participated in initiatives aimed at redesigning or improving services, incorporating collaboration, co-production, and user-centred design approaches.
• Supported 179 organisations in taking proactive steps to centre lived experience in all aspects of service design, delivery, advocacy, and community development.
• 439 EBEs have been engaged in EAR partnership activities, with 241 EBEs securing a role within an organisation in the partner local areas.
• 48 leaders with lived experience of forced displacement have taken part in leadership development opportunities and worked with sector partners to transform the role of lived experience in the refugee sector. 

• Built a community of 214 organisations committed to transforming the asylum sector in England by creating services that are adaptive, grounded in early action, and driven by organisations committed to centring lived experience and collaboration.

For more in-depth case studies on these areas, visit the EAR webpage.

Highlights from the Refugee Action Team

• Training and Capacity Building: Through programmes like the Emerging Leaders Training with Caplor Horizons and the Communication Programme in partnership with Debate Mate, we equipped partner EBEs (experts by experience) with essential leadership, collaboration, and public speaking skills.
  “This training has significantly boosted my confidence. It’s helped me communicate more effectively, make decisions with assurance, and handle challenging situations with self-control.” – Participant in Emerging Leaders Training
• EBE Project Planning Course: We designed a course that guides organisations in creating projects that engage people with lived experience of forced displacement. The framework covers everything from problem identification to idea generation and prioritization.
  “Setting up an EBE group for governance was on our strategic agenda for a year but hadn’t happened until now. The EBE Project Planning gave us the push we needed. The expenses reimbursement was key to convincing the board to support this initiative.” – Leyla, Routes Collective
• Facilitation Skills Development: Recognising the need for safe spaces where people with lived experience could rebuild confidence and self-esteem, we launched facilitation training. This helped practitioners develop the skills necessary to create supportive spaces. We held 4 online and 2 in-person sessions, with 29 organizations participating. Many reported significant growth in their abilities, with several organizations adopting the facilitation tools in co-production activities.
  “We used many tools and resources from the 'Refugee Action - Facilitators Practice Development Day' during our World Jewish Relief STEP Away Day. Thank you, Refugee Action, for all the facilitation ideas and resources – we learned so much in just one day!” – Elly Brimacombe, Programme Officer, World Jewish Relief
• Reclaiming Lived Experience Leadership Conference: In the spring, Refugee Action co-organized the Reclaiming Lived Experience Leadership conference with Freedom from Torture, Refugee Council, and Migration Exchange. The event, attended by 75 staff and volunteers, focused on defining lived experience leadership, dismantling barriers to power, and improving career opportunities for individuals with lived experience. Partners like Bristol Refugee Rights and PAFRAS played an active role in making sure grassroots insights shaped national-level discussions.
• The Experts by Experience and Partnerships website - Through EAR we have been able to develop the EBE and P website which shares case studies and good practice from across the sector with a focus on building lived experience work. This site had 18k visits in the last year and features articles from over 25 different organisations as well as openly accessible guides, resources, templates and toolkits for improving services and practice to support asylum seekers and refugees.

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The Explore Adapt Renew Programme has been a transformative journey, and while we may be closing this chapter, the relationships across the partnership and networks will continue to be supportive and people have expressed the desire to stay connected to support each other’s work. The impact will continue to resonate as we move forward with the collective aim of improving the asylum system for those who need it most.