CREATIVE ACTION · LOCAL SOLUTIONS
Communities author their own change.
Every voice matters — and creativity can unlock that voice. In the face of displacement’s hardest challenges, we exist to scaffold community-powered solutions, rooted in local wisdom, lived experience, and creativity. By engaging communities as collaborators — not just beneficiaries — we foster sustainable, dignified change that endures.
WHAT WE DO · OUR METHOD · CREATIVE ACTION
Turning challenges into community-powered solutions.
CAFAR uses creative, culturally grounded methods to tackle complex humanitarian challenges alongside displaced communities — whether it’s mental health, education, gender equality, peacebuilding or climate action. We work with local voices to co-design low-cost, imaginative solutions that restore dignity and help communities thrive.
We listen and identify
Alongside the community, we use creative methods to listen, see and identify — surfacing not only the challenges people face, but the individual and collective strengths and agency the community already holds.
We uncover the causes
Through courageous, imaginative action — theatre, storytelling, play and embodied cultural practices — the community makes sense of what drives the challenges, and wear solutions may sit.
We build together
The community designs its own response, and we train facilitators from within — pairing lived experience with professional expertise.
WHO WE ARE
A method shaped by years of listening.
CAFAR formed in 2023, in response to Uganda’s growing refugee crisis. In our first years — delivering programmes alongside partners like AVSI, World Vision and the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives — we learned what displaced communities kept telling us: the answers they need are best authored by them.
Those programmes became our proving ground. What we learned in them we sharpened into Creative Action — the method that now shapes everything we do.
FEATURED PROJECT
Women's Rights Now
At Imvepi settlement, women were losing land through agreements they’d never been able to read. So we trained local paralegals and worked through forum theatre and community dialogue — until women knew their rights, and could claim them. The knowledge stays in the community, carried by the people we trained.
180
Women reached via VSLA's
18
women trained as community paralegals
9
New Businesses