Psychosocial Skills for Refugees Living in LAF Shelters

Funded by the Berlin State Office for Refugee Affairs (LAF)

Since 2018, our experienced project team has been regularly visiting all of the Berlin refugee shelters administered by LAF in Berlin on a rotating basis to provide on-site psychosocial counseling and various group services. The project is an important and effective addition to the work of the counselors at the IPSO Care Center in Berlin. It gives people who, for various reasons, cannot visit our care center in person, access to confidential, culturally sensitive counseling in their mother tongue. In addition to face-to-face counseling, IPSO also provides online counseling through our confidential www.ipso-care.com platform as well as our IPSO Care App in more than 20 languages.

In addition to individual counseling, our IPSO team also organises regular discussion groups covering psychosocial issues as well as holding awareness-raising and initial talks with residents and local actors. Peaceful coexistence is promoted by training residents to become so-called peace ambassadors, who volunteer to work in the shelters.

IPSO also works closely with the social teams in the shelters to provide residents with quick access to services covering asylum law, housing, health, family, etc., as needed. This practical help supports the reduction of psychosocial stressors. IPSO maintains contact with other local psychosocial organisations in order to be able to provide the best possible care in good time, especially to people with severe psychiatric problems.

During the 2023 project year we were able to provide the following counseling languages for our outreach work:

• Arabic
• Kurdish / Kurmanji
• Dari / Fasi
• French
• English
• West African languages Fula, Pulaar, Maninka
• Russian
• Ukrainian

Other languages are available from: www.ipso-care.com

• Amharic
• Tigrinya

All of the shelters in Berlin are welcome to take advantage of the project’s services.

If you need a service, please contact:
Hussein Alalo
Project coordinator