About

The Refugee Archive is a nonprofit organization that collects, preserves, and publishes long-form personal testimony from displaced women around the world, primarily single mothers and female heads of household living as refugees or internally displaced people. We turn that testimony into three things: a permanent historical record, published research and public content, and data that informs policy. In simple terms, we are in the business of recording history while it is happening, and making sure it survives, gets used, and reaches the people who can act on it.

Our Core Service

Our core product is the oral history itself: a structured, multi-day recorded interview conducted by a trained team, translated where needed, transcribed by hand, and preserved in partnership with university archives as a permanent research record. This is not a quick interview. Each one takes real time, real infrastructure, and real cost to produce responsibly, and it results in a piece of primary-source material that did not exist before and cannot be recreated later.

From that core service, several distinct lines of work extend outward:

Archival Partnerships. We work with universities and research institutions to house completed oral history collections as formal special collections, available to researchers for years to come. This is where academic institutions engage with us directly.

Publishing and Public Content. Testimony, with consent, is adapted into podcasts, articles, video, and public-facing material that documents conditions on the ground in displacement and conflict settings. This is where media outlets, journalists, and public communications partners engage with us.

Youth Arts Program. We pair young artists, primarily from developing countries, with approved excerpts of oral history testimony and support them in creating original creative work in response. This is where educational institutions, arts organizations, and youth-focused funders engage with us.

Policy Research. We run structured, student-led research programs, country by country, that examine how national laws and public systems actually affect displaced single mothers and female-headed households. This work is currently active in multiple countries. This is where policymakers, government partners, and research institutions engage with us.

Economic Development. Findings from our collected testimony directly inform the design of economic support projects, including microlending initiatives, for the communities we work alongside. This is where economic development partners and impact investors engage with us.

We also produce a webinar, The Refugee Archive Roundtable, a collaborative space for like-minded published researchers to discuss policy, data, and action in the field, alongside public events, and an annual journal.

Our partners include universities and archives, journalists and media organizations, policymakers and research institutions, youth arts and education programs, and individual and institutional donors. Each partner engages with a different part of the same underlying work: a permanent, ethically produced record of displacement, built directly from the people living through it.

The Refugee Archive is a verified 501(c)(3) nonprofit, funded through donor contributions, partnership agreements, and grant support. Every dollar funds a specific, itemized part of the process, from the direct costs a participant needs to take part, to translation, archival preparation, and staff time.