Reflections
What remains, what we carry forward, and what’s to come
It鈥檚 Spring now, though my body hasn鈥檛 caught up yet. The changing season signifies an important shift, even if I can鈥檛 fully explain why. Perhaps it鈥檚 the pouring rain drawing in a lingering winter, bringing obscurity, rather than a clear arrival into newness. Maybe that in-between state is where I鈥檝e been finding myself, when I feel at ease, and what this moment holds.
The 2025 Migrant Systems Change Leadership (MSCL) program concluded two months ago. It鈥檚 April as I鈥檓 writing this, and yet it doesn鈥檛 feel distant or resolved in the way things often do once they鈥檝e been formally closed, summarized, and named complete on paper. Since writing my last blog in November, on the necessity of migrant spaces, I鈥檝e found myself returning not just to the question of why our spaces matter, but to an unfurling of thoughts: what happens after we鈥檝e created them, after we鈥檝e shared them, after we鈥檝e experienced鈥攅ven briefly鈥� what becomes possible within them.
We marked the closing of the 2025 cohort more than once. First, through a smaller, more intimate gathering in January, and then again through a larger, public celebration at the event in February; each carrying its own energy, contradiction and emotion, its own way of holding what had unfolded over the months prior. Across these moments, there was something unmistakable in the room: a kind of vibrancy that felt both expansive and intensely relational, as cohort members and community alike struck conversations, reaching toward one another, stretching time in small ways as if resisting the inevitability of dispersal.
Roots and Futures, 2026
Roots and Futures, 2026
Roots and Futures, 2026
Roots and Futures, 2026
Roots and Futures, 2026
Roots and Futures, 2026
Roots and Futures, 2026
Roots and Futures, 2026
I found myself sitting with a complicated sensation: what does it mean to celebrate in a time like this, when the conditions shaping migrant lives remain marked by ongoing state-led violence, by regressive policy-making, by displacement, by borders that continue to harm and exclude, by the enduring realities of colonization that structure the very Lands we gather on? What does it mean to come together in joy and celebration while鈥攁t the same time鈥� knowing that the systems we are naming and resisting are not abstract nor distant, but actively producing harm in the present, in ways that many within and beyond this space continue to experience daily? These questions do not have easy answers, and perhaps they are not meant to be resolved superficially, but rather held in tandem. The celebration was real, and so too was the exhaustion, the frustration, the uncertainty, the unavoidable weight of what exists beyond the space we created.
The MSCL program, and the wider community of the Refugee Livelihood Lab, facilitates pockets of space where migrants can speak without the constant negotiation of how to be understood. Where stories do not have to be translated into something more legible or palatable in order to be taken seriously. Where leadership is not defined through proximity to power or institutional validation, but through the ways people show up for one another. Through their willingness to name what is often left unnamed. Through their capacity to hold complexity without rushing toward simplification or reactive resolution. What we build together resists easy articulation precisely because it is not designed to be easily captured, measured, or contained.
The success and necessity of our work lives instead in the relationships that are formed, in the language that people find for experiences that had long existed without recognition or validation, and in the moments of resonance when sharing a difficult experience where others respond not with surprise, but with a kind of immediate understanding. It lives in the courage it takes to speak honestly about systems that continue to harm, even as we are asked to accept them, navigate them, to work within them, to represent them in ways that often require compromise. And it lives, too, in the refusals that emerged throughout the program. Refusals to accept dominant narratives about who migrants are and what we deserve. Refusals to perform gratitude in exchange for access. Refusals to separate personal experience from structural analysis as though the two were ever distinct.
Systems change, in this sense, becomes less about large-scale interventions that are legible to institutions, and more about the relationships, refusals, and reimaginings that are already taking place, often in ways that are subtle, less visible, and yet deeply transformative.
If anything, what this cohort has further emphasized is what I鈥檝e already known to be true: migrants are not waiting to be included in systems change, but are actively enacting it, often without recognition and always without the conditions that would make that work sustainable. Participants entered this space carrying forms of knowledge that are often dismissed and undervalued. Through knowledge of policy and institutional systems, or knowledge shaped from lived experiences, through navigating borders, exclusions, and everyday negotiations of belonging, an abundance of insight was present that is rarely acknowledged. What shifted was not what people knew, but how that knowledge was collectively held, affirmed, and understood as valid, critical, and central. In that shift, leadership began to take on a different form, one that moved away from individual recognition and toward collective responsibility. Systems change, in this sense, becomes less about large-scale interventions that are legible to institutions, and more about the relationships, refusals, and reimaginings that are already taking place, often in ways that are subtle, less visible, and yet deeply transformative.
Our Roots and Futures gathering in February moulded an opening for what could come next. There was a collective insistence that more migrant spaces are needed.
But we can鈥檛 do it alone.
Migrant-led spaces and systems change cannot be created in isolated settings and then left behind. Continuous nurturing, resourcing, and relationship-building is required with those who are leading the work. We know what we created and continue to create together is meaningful and important. What we need is for others鈥攑artners, funders, decision-makers, community groups鈥攖o start knowing too.
What we have built during our time together persists in what we carry forward, in the ways we move through the world differently, in the questions we continue to ask, in the refusals we are no longer willing to let go of. It lives on in the relationships that remain, even as the formal structure falls away, and in the responsibility that comes with having experienced a collective breath that felt鈥攅ven briefly鈥� more aligned with the world we are trying to build.
Just as the seasons change, what remains is a responsibility to keep going. What today calls for is continuation.