Name: Ben Bazley
Work Period: February – July 2021
Q: 1 What was your role at Act for Displaced (AfD)?
Climate Team Lead
Q 2: What did you learn during your tenure?
During my tenure, I learnt the ins and outs of editing. I learnt how to offer feedback and suggestions in a timely manner. It was an informative process as I learnt the correct depth and spread of feedback to give. I also refined my article writing skills. As a writer, my skills have been thoroughly improved by this process.
Q 3: How has your experience at AfD helped you?
My experience at AfD taught me how to lead a team. Before working for AfD, I found offering constructive criticism tricky. During my time at AfD, I learnt how to effectively offer feedback to my team to further their abilities but to also protect their wellbeing. During my time at AfD, I also learnt how much autonomy to give my team. I now feel confident in how much guidance and how much independence I should offer to a team I lead.
Q 4: Will you encourage others to work at AfD? If yes, why?
I would encourage others to work for AfD. In my role, I had much freedom to write on topics which interested me. I was also given lots of responsibilities which greatly improved my repertoire of skills. Also, I worked with a great team who were all friendly and positive.
Name: Ghada A. Abdallah
Q: 1 What was your role at Act for Displaced (AfD)?
I worked for 6 months with AFD as a Humanitarian Content Writer.
Q 2: What did you learn during your tenure?
I have been working with displaced individuals but writing about them, meant more research and seeking more sources and not just depending on one single experience, so those researches and resources I read to write my articles actually enriched me with more information.
Q 3: How has your experience at AfD helped you?
I was following different articles written by other colleagues on the AFD website and I had more insights into refugees’ problems in different countries, which I didn’t know about all of them. The team of writers is from different countries and this means you have different views and areas covered, also different obstacles and struggles. So instead of being focused on one country or one context, it is actually trying to advocate for all the displaced people around the globe.
Q 4: Will you encourage others to work at AfD? If yes, why?
This experience was interesting and self-motivating to me to continue working with this field and making more efforts to support the displaced refugees, asylum seeks, and closed files. I would recommend others who would like to participate in advocating this cause to join AFD.
