Empowering Women, Strengthening Communities: Reflecting on the Impact of ELEVATE HERight
Generation for Change CY
Creating safer, more inclusive communities requires more than raising awareness. It means ensuring that people know where to seek support, feel empowered to access it, and are surrounded by communities that understand, recognize, and actively challenge gender-based violence.
Over the past year, the ELEVATE HERight project has worked towards this vision by supporting migrant and refugee women in Cyprus through a combination of awareness-raising, community engagement, practical skills development, and improved access to support services.
Recognizing that women with migrant and refugee backgrounds face additional barriers when seeking protection and assistance, the project adopted a holistic approach that combined prevention, empowerment, and direct support.
Throughout its implementation, ELEVATE HERight delivered a wide range of activities designed to strengthen both individual resilience and community awareness.
A dedicated one-to-one case management service provided personalized guidance and referrals for women affected by or at risk of gender-based violence, helping participants navigate available support services safely and confidentially. To further improve access to information, the project developed comprehensive support service databases, enabling migrant and refugee women, community members, and professionals to more easily identify available social, legal, healthcare, educational, and gender-based violence support services across Cyprus.
Alongside these services, participants took part in community-based sewing and tailoring workshops that combined practical vocational skills with discussions on empowerment, wellbeing, and gender-based violence. These sessions created safe and supportive spaces where women could build confidence, develop new skills, strengthen peer networks, and share experiences in an environment based on trust and mutual support.
Beyond working directly with women, the project also sought to engage the wider community. Community discussions brought together migrant women, migrant men, community leaders, and professionals to encourage open conversations around gender-based violence, challenge harmful stereotypes, and promote shared responsibility in preventing violence against women.
Awareness-raising formed another important pillar of the project. Through multilingual campaigns, printed materials, online resources, and community outreach, ELEVATE HERight worked to ensure that information about gender-based violence and available support services reached diverse communities in accessible and culturally sensitive ways.
The project concluded with a final conference celebrating the achievements of participants while bringing together civil society organizations, service providers, community representatives, and stakeholders to reflect on the project’s outcomes and explore how collaboration can continue beyond its lifetime.
Although the project has now officially concluded, its impact continues.
The resources developed throughout ELEVATE HERight, including the support service databases, strengthened partnerships, and community networks established during implementation, will continue supporting migrant and refugee women beyond the project’s duration.
We would like to sincerely thank all participants, partner organizations, community leaders, stakeholders, and collaborators whose commitment and contributions made the project possible. Their engagement has helped create lasting foundations for more informed, inclusive, and resilient communities.
The ELEVATE HERight project was implemented by Generation for Change CY in partnership with the Cyprus Family Planning Association (CFPA) and was co-funded under the PREVENT Programme through the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) Programme of the European Union, the Bodossaki Foundation, and the NGO Support Centre.
