The Aropa Initiative for International Solidarity

Your partner in equity, learning, and change within the humanitarian, development, and human rights sectors.

AIIS Services

The Aropa Initiative for International Solidarity suite of services is a specialized Aropa offering, designed to support international organizations with their pursuit of equity, learning, and change.

  • We assist international organizations and funders in conducting external research and thorough internal assessments, generating actionable recommendations, and setting goals to improve pursuit of mission and equity commitments.

  • We support organizations in reflecting on options for governance models and leadership structures that reflect your values, mission objectives, and business model.

  • We facilitate the development of strategies and theories of change that center communities, operationalize your values. steward your mission, and acknowledge evolving political realities.

  • We partner with you to enhance institutional culture to promote diversity, equity and inclusion, including through the review and enhancement of recruitment, hiring, and onboarding practices to include individuals with relevant lived experience.

  • We help organizations cultivate equitable partnerships that foster collaboration, trust, and relational working methods with their clients, constituencies, and served communities.

Why AIIS?

We get it.

We are a diverse team—women, queer, migrants, neuroatypical thinkers, reformed white saviors, forcibly displaced people, and community leaders—with firsthand experience navigating complex global systems. Our background in the humanitarian sector, particularly in localization and Meaningful Refugee Participation, inspired us to build a consulting practice focused on practical, actionable systemic change. We guide organizations through the complex work of rethinking power, shifting systems, embedding accountability, strengthening localized structures, cultivating inclusive cultures, and fostering community-led responses. We work in English, French, Arabic, Malay, and Spanish.

AIIS Clients

  • African Wildlife Foundation
  • Asylum Access
  • EarthRights International
  • International Refugee Assistance Project
  • Mapa do acolhimento
  • Humanitarian Policy Group/ODI
  • Raeduun Sustainable Development
  • Resourcing Refugee Leadership Initiative (RRLI)
  • Solidarity Center
  • Village Enterprise

Resources from AIIS

Aropa served as expert strategist, author and/or editor for several sectoral learning guides, initiatives and publications related to equity in humanitarianism.

Cohere’s Five Organisational Pathways for Enabling Meaningful Refugee Participation: A Step-by-Step Implementation Guide. (strategist and lead author)

Global Refugee-led Network’s Meaningful Refugee Participation Guidelines (Co-author and strategist)

Asylum Access’s Equitable Partnership Guidelines (V2) and its corresponding Accountability Toolkit (Editor)

Cohere’s Interactive Worshop Series Building Organizational Pathways towards Meaningful Participation and Refugee Leadership (Strategist and Moderator)

The RRLI-commissioned Metasynthesis of Five External Impact Evaluations covering programs run by RLOs (Researcher and author)

Forced Migration Review 74, Financing displacement response. Lessons from the Resourcing Refugee Leadership Initiative’s grant-making model (Researcher and Co-Author)

The New Humanitarian How to End Tokenism and Embrace Real Refugee Participation (Author)

The New Humanitarian Rethinking Humanitarianism Podcast How to step aside to promote change (Speaker)