Apatride Network is now live on Open Collective. Thank you to the Open Collective team for such a user-friendly and helpful platform, and to Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion for discovering this platform for us! We will strive to utilize the opportunity to its full potential, to directly and positively impact the lives of stateless people. 

The main pillars of our work are a response to the key problems in the field of statelessness: low awareness of statelessness, poor connectivity between stateless people and organizations that seek to help us, and insufficient cooperation between relevant stakeholders. To the end of resolving these problems, our work focuses on the following: 

1.      Awareness raising and advocacy 

2.      Outreach and community building 

3.      Connecting stateless people to legal aid and establishing legal-aid units 

4.      Serving as ‘bridge builders’ between relevant actors such as academics, NGOs, UN agencies, state-actors, the media, financial institutions, blockchain sector, etc.

More than 90% of our members at Apatride Network are people with lived-experience of statelessness. The topic is of direct and personal concern to us. Importantly, we are not just stateless people that have stories to tell: we are experts in the field that are well-positioned to see and report on gaps to be filled—legal, methodological, epistemological, among others. We aim to improve not only our own line of work, but that of our colleagues at the UN agencies, NGOs, academia, and civil society at large.