Our Chief Executive, Duncan Lewis has enjoyed a rewarding first year as a Councillor of Emmaus International (CEI), visiting countries in Africa and Europe.
After being elected as one of 12 CEIs at the Emmaus Europe General Assembly in Romania last October, Duncan has attended meetings and visited communities in Benin, west Africa, Bosnia, Lithuania, Latvia and Paris.
Duncan, who has been at the helm of Emmaus Hertfordshire for nearly four years, serves as a representative for the Emmaus Europe Board (Regional Council) and the Emmaus International Board. As well as working on different European-wide projects, his role as CEI requires him to attend all Emmaus Europe and Emmaus International Board meetings.
Here Duncan outlines his busy, but hugely rewarding first year:
I’ve attended lots of meetings, some of them in Paris where Emmaus Europe and Emmaus International are headquartered, staying in basic accommodation provided for the offices there, but also taking trips elsewhere.
Benin, West Africa
We had an international board meeting in Benin, West Africa, in the spring of 2024 and that was fascinating because, as well as the meetings, we were able to visit some of the projects and some of the work that the organisation does out there.
These include helping schools and setting up communities that are similar in structure in some respects to the communities that we have here in the UK; some selling second-hand goods, some doing agricultural projects. We also visited a big project at a place called Lake Nokoué in the southern part of Benin, funded by the EU and Emmaus International, providing fresh drinking water and sanitation to the community that lives on the shores of the lake.
Breeding catfish
It was fascinating to have meetings there and you’re constantly reminded of the breadth and variety that exists within Emmaus. The broader the scale you look at Emmaus, the more varied it becomes. There are lots of social enterprises going on in the Emmaus communities in Benin, things we would never contemplate doing over here, like pressing fruit to make fruit juice which is sold commercially.
There are some communities that sell second-hand goods but most of it was agricultural activity. They had a fishery in one of the communities and were breeding catfish that were about two or three feet long, and they were also breeding flies to create their own fish food.
It was fascinating seeing the range of different models around the core Emmaus principle of having a community with a social enterprise activity that makes it largely financially self-sufficient.
Preventing people trafficking
Whereas homelessness is our focus over here, there were other issues for Benin communities such as trying to stop people-trafficking, a fundamental problem over there. Their focus is on trying to make sure that young people have shelter, an education and future opportunities so that they don’t fall prey to people traffickers promising them a better future in Europe. So a completely different set of challenges but with the same core values and the same ethos behind the Emmaus operating model of a social enterprise helping to create a degree of financial independence. Benin was a fascinating trip.
Bosnia
We had a European Board meeting in Bosnia, in Srebrenica. Unfortunately, during the war, this was the site of a massacre. As well as visiting the local community and having our meetings, we also visited a memorial and the cemetery to pay our respects to the 8,000 or so victims of that terrible atrocity. It was very moving and amazing to see the work the local Emmaus community has done to try and help people to rebuild their lives. They have a residential school for the children of the local agricultural communities and they have an elderly people’s home. A lot of the women were left on their own because a lot of the male members of the family were killed in the genocide.
Lithuania and Latvia
We visited Emmaus communities in Lithuanian and Latvia in September to check on the process of trial communities and assess whether they were ready to become full members. It’s about evaluation against a set of criteria; are they well enough governed, are they financially independent enough, are they doing the right kind of work? While we’re there, if they’re not meeting all the necessary targets, we offer them advice on how they might be able to achieve this. It’s hard for some of those organisations because there isn’t necessarily an established culture around participation in the charitable sector, or if there is, it operates in a different way to here. Recruiting a board of trustees for your charity in Latvia is not easy because it’s not something that happens commonly, whereas in the UK that’s a relatively easy thing to do.
It’s a case of trying to adapt and trying to help them to navigate their way through. From our point of view, if you’re going to let them into the federation then you want to know they’re being properly governed, otherwise there’s a reputational risk. It was fascinating to see the work they do and the group in Lithuania did a lot of work on people trafficking as well.
Paris
I was in Paris at the end of November for an international board meeting. We visited a big community called Emmaus Solidarity in Paris and went to their refugee centre. This is a big organisation, something like a housing association in the UK. The accommodation they have is scattered all around Paris, but the refugee centre we visited is a refurbished school. It was a meeting place with training rooms, classrooms, an auditorium and a café. In France, the unconditional welcome is very much part of Emmaus. It feels as though in the UK we’re more focused on risk assessment, but in France, a welcome is extended without the same level of background checks. During the board meeting we talked about Emmaus International’s ability to conduct advocacy and campaigning and policy work, and the best model to do that; whether that should be bottom-up from grass roots level or top-down, focussing on getting a seat at the table of the United Nations. There’s a team of French consultants who have been asked to look at this and their view was that Emmaus does have the scale and the credibility to have a meaningful voice in something like the United Nations.
Embracing new communities
The broad agendas are quite wide-ranging, and we make decisions on admitting new communities, so we’re either admitting them to be trial members or agreeing to their conversion from trial members to full members. We might make decisions occasionally to remove communities if they’re in breach of rules. We look at solidarity, payments and funding and how that’s distributed globally. There are some pots of funding that Emmaus International looks after that they then distribute globally; it tends to be a redistribution of wealth from the richer countries like France to some of the poorer countries in the developing world. But it’s not all developing countries, there are some European countries that benefit as well.
Funding emergency work
They fund everything from emergency work, as well as longer term projects. Recent examples include the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria in 2023 – a lot of Emmaus communities donated to help, so a fund was set up to assist. As well as helping in the immediate aftermath, the money raised will be used to fund longer-term projects at the next stage of regeneration.
The Container Programme
The Container Programme is another good example of a big project that’s ongoing; containers of clothing, furniture, bric-a-brac are sent primarily from the developed European countries out to the developing world, and historically there have been quite significant numbers sent.
We used to send them from the UK but post-pandemic and post-Brexit it’s become a lot more logistically difficult to do from the UK, so whether it’s something we can do again in the future, I don’t know. I do know that it makes an enormous difference for the communities who receive the containers. Equally we need to make sure that they’re not solely dependent on that, so there’s a balance to be struck there.
I know some Spanish communities got involved in helping the communities affected by flooding near Valencia and there’s ongoing help for communities in the Lebanon who are obviously suffering now because of conflict there, and in Ukraine as well.
In seeing this work, you realise the breadth of Emmaus. It’s nice because in this role I get to see the difference we make to individuals here in Hertfordshire, but I also get to see the bigger picture of what Emmaus does on a global basis, and there is an awful lot of great work happening in all sorts of different places.
Some of the meetings we have are on Teams and Zoom, so we don’t always need to travel. The international meetings are interesting because you have representatives from Asia, South America, Africa, and across Europe. Because they are global and multi-cultural meetings, you get real differences of perspective. In a lot of the meetings the main language is French so you’re listening to things being translated. They have a team of volunteer interpreters who sit in booths at the back of the meeting room, and you wear a headset. In all meetings there are three languages, English, French or Spanish, and whichever one is being spoken, it will be translated into the other two for everybody else, so language is not a barrier. You must remember to speak slowly and clearly so that the translators can keep up.
World Forum of Alternatives
We had the World Forum of Alternatives in Poitiers, France, during the summer which I went to as part of my role as board member. This is a forum for generating ideas and discussing topics, so there’s less governance involved than at the World Assembly.
It’s Emmaus-led but with involvement from guest speakers as well, with 400 people from 150 Emmaus groups in attendance examining alternative solutions to the world’s problems. There were workshops on everything from broad issues like migration to much more specific Emmaus topics like giving a structured welcome to companions.
Multi-cultural meetings
I helped deliver a workshop with Emmaus UK Chief Executive, Charlotte Talbott, on the companion welcome and offer in the UK, offering a dignified and structured offering for companions. We delivered to a multicultural audience as the attendance was global, and we had some positive feedback.
You realise how things are quite different in different countries; we’re quite a developed market here, quite focused and quite heavily regulated, having the Charity Commission that we report to and Emmaus UK as a central national federation in the UK. Being quite structured in our approach and explaining what we do in the UK, it was interesting to hear from other people who shared what they do in less regulated environments and are much more fluid and flexible.
There’s always a great energy at those kinds of events because you’ve got all these people from different countries and cultures, all of whom are united by a desire to support Emmaus and the work it does. All of whom want to make the world a better place, and being part of that is good for morale and motivation.