Huma Umar
Sakhi
New York City, USA
The final few weeks of my internship have slowed down a bit as I’m working on transitioning most of the clients I was working with directly to my team members. My team had also been dealing with a backlog of new clients due to limited advocates and more and more people seeking services, so some of my time recently has been spent on establishing contact and overcoming the backlog.
Every week throughout my time at Sakhi so far, I remember thinking at some point that I could do more, that I wasn’t doing enough. Retrospectively, as I look at my spreadsheet of clients and their needs and the plan I’ve made with them going forward, I’m realizing that I’ve done a lot more work than I’ve maybe realized and acknowledged, even for myself. Quite early on I realized the right amount of professional distance I needed to maintain with the recollections of trauma that were being shared with me for my own ability to work and advocate, and honoring these boundaries for myself has allowed me to not be burnt out (along with a very supportive team), which is what I was most anxious about.
Yet, I think I wasn’t adequately prepared for other challenges that came about due to just NGO work. One of the biggest challenges was essentially that funding for gender-based violence, especially organizations that supported survivors of intimate partner violence, really increased during the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, though, with things returning back to “normal”, this funding has really started to dry up, leaving organizations with a range of logistical issues — at Sakhi, this has meant that the amount of emergency funding we offer to clients has become quite limited.
This has been frustrating, because along with informing clients about limited mental health and housing resources, as well as limited pro bono lawyers, I have on occasion also had to inform survivors in difficult and uncertain circumstances that we can support them with only a very little amount of emergency funding. As this internship winds down, I’ve been spending a lot of time reflecting on the dynamics of NGO-work specifically, and the seemingly ever-present scarcity of resources related to this work. The experience at Sakhi has been very grounding in familiarizing me with the stark realities of the human rights non-profit space. At this point in time, funding seems like the biggest issue, but in an atmosphere of constant scarcity, how does one begin to try to reimagine and reinvent the ways human rights work is being done? How do we reorient the status quo in human rights work while remaining dependent on systems that are unwilling to provide holistic assistance?