What you need to do

Developing participation in your service or organisation requires several resources, and you must ensure that the right type and amount of resource if allocated to each of participation stages or activities described in this Toolkit. This resource allocation should be part of your Refugee Participation Plan. These resources depend on the aims of participation, the number of refugees you work with, and the overall funding and other assets that you can draw upon.

You may need to justify allocating funding to a new set of activities or tasks within your service or organisation, and the final decision may not be yours alone. If you find it hard to allocate resources to refugee participation from existing budgets, there are other possibilities to explore, depending on the nature of your service or organisation. For instance, you could:

• Propose to run a pilot on a small scale to evaluate, before requesting and/or more funding 
• Bid for funding for a dedicated project focused on developing refugee participation
• Ensure that future business planning or requests for funding embed refugee participation
• Pool resources with other similar organisations from your sector or local area (for instance, several local organisations, from different sectors, could contribute to the development of a ‘refugee advisory group’, which they could all then engage with for their individual aims)  
• Recruit volunteers to run at least some aspects of the participation process
• Focus on developing online participation tools – these will have higher set up costs, including digital skills training and inclusion tools, but could be less costly in the long run 
• Use community assets and social capital where available 

A range of resources will be required to support several aspects of participation, from recruitment and training, through running activities and ongoing communication, to monitoring and evaluation. Specific items include staff time for coordination, venues and refreshments for meetings, interpreting and translation, facilitation of meetings, information resources, surveys and questionnaires, and administration support. Even for small organisations, some consideration for resources will be needed, including staff time and language support (interpreting).