As a Refugee Ambassador this year, I was honoured to have worked with Rhodes Trust, Fenella Porter and team to help design and host a conversation that would challenge and inspire Rhodes Scholars. Our goal was not simply to “share stories,” but to reframe them to move refugee narratives from beneficiary to leader, and to ask what solidarity truly means in practice. The conversation brought to life the Rhodes Trust’s vision of developing leaders who not only understand the world, but seek to change it.
Framed around the idea that “the personal is political,” the sessions storytelling shifted the focus from individual trauma to community, contribution, and collective transformation. Our aim was to move refugee narratives from beneficiary to leader and oh did it do that with the personal journeys of three remarkable speakers. Douna Haj Ahmed, Amanda Kamanda and Ahmed Mutahar each of whom offered a different lens on displacement, identity, and leadership and who helped us explore what that means for global solidarity, and systemic change.
Amanda, a Ugandan scholar and activist, came to the UK on a Commonwealth Scholarship. “I arrived in October 2021, excited to study and develop myself,” she told us. “I didn’t think about migration in the long term. I was coming for education and for growth.”
But when she represented Uganda in an international beauty pageant as a transgender woman, her story became public. “What was a moment of pride for me became a source of national shame at home,” she said. “My safety was compromised overnight. I couldn’t go back.”
Amanda spoke about rebuilding from scratch and learning to call a new country “home,” navigating racism, transphobia, and isolation, and creating a walking initiative across London boroughs to raise awareness on migrant rights. “Migration isn’t something you plan,” she said. “But you can still make meaning of it.”
For Douna, a Syrian journalist and activist, words became both a weapon and a form of healing. She said “I grew up in fear even walls had ears. Speaking was dangerous, but silence was worse.” It became apparent that her book, written in exile, is an act of resistance. She added “I don’t speak for refugees, I speak with them. My story is part of a collective story, for friends who couldn’t make it out, and for those still trying.”
Ahmed, a Yemeni academic who arrived in the UK in 2022 with his pregnant wife, reflected on starting again. “We felt welcomed, but we were also blind, navigating new systems, new rules, a new life,” he said. Volunteering with local refugee support teams helped him connect to community and to purpose. “Don’t wait for someone to make space for you,” he said. “Create your own.”
Each of these stories grounded a truth that sits at the core the personal is never separate from the political. Every story of flight, rebuilding, or belonging is also a story of policy, power, and the systems that shape who gets to move, who gets to stay, and who gets to lead.
And as ever I was amazed when the discussion soon turned to the meaning of solidarity and what it looks like in practice. “Solidarity is not a poster,” one panellist said. “It’s not about sympathy or slogans, it’s about showing up and sharing risk.”
True solidarity, the group agreed, is proximity with responsibility. It means using your platform, privilege, or access to amplify others, not to speak for them. It means recognising that inclusion without influence is tokenism. “If I’m in the room, but not part of the decision, that’s not inclusion, it’s decoration,” Douna reminded us. Amanda put it differently she added “Everywhere you go, policies are being passed about you, not with you. If you don’t speak up, you’ll find that a new law has been passed, and you’ve been erased.”
For the Rhodes Scholars in the room and for all those who will go on to hold positions of influence across Oxford, the UK, and beyond the challenge was clear. The ask was to move solidarity from empathy to action. That means acting in community as the super power we possess, co-designing research, advocacy, and programmes with refugee-led organisations, not consulting them as an afterthought. It means shifting from project-based involvement to long-term partnership, and resourcing leadership with real budgets, decision-making power, and trust that enables wellbeing.
Most importantly, it also means building community as part of building solidarity nurturing the relationships that allow us to see one another in our differences, to listen across experience, and to build connections rooted in respect and mutual understanding. Because solidarity is sustained not only through statements or strategies, but through the everyday practice of showing up, learning together, and standing beside one another in shared struggle.
Then the question came in, if we were to start again, what would a refugee system designed around refugee leadership actually look like?
The panellists were clear; it would start by cantering agency over charity. Refugee-led organisations would be the first point of partnership, with direct, flexible funding. They would sit on decision-making boards, shape research and advocacy priorities, and hold governments and donors accountable for results. Ahmed captured it best he said “We can’t just keep thanking the system for letting us survive. We have to be part of redesigning it.”
That redesign would also mean tackling how we see “expertise.” It would mean valuing lived experience as a source of political, social, and technical knowledge, not a story to be extracted for visibility. As Douna said “I’m tired of being invited to panels to tell my trauma. My story is not a spectacle, it’s evidence.”
In my work across humanitarian and development contexts, we’ve learned the same lesson repeatedly, the people most affected by crisis are not passive recipients. They are organisers, economists, researchers, and change-makers. Solidarity beyond slogans means designing for equality, not just declaring it. It means turning values into architecture, into the budgets, job descriptions, funding criteria, and governance models that shape the humanitarian and academic sectors alike. As Amanda reminded the room “If you’re waiting for someone else to make it safe, they won’t. You have to claim space, and build safety for those coming after you.”
The conversation at Rhodes House was ultimately about power, who has it, who shares it, and who designs the systems that govern our lives. And as Douna closed the evening she said “We can rebuild. Even when you’re uprooted, you can still bloom.” That is the work of leadership, for Rhodes Scholars, and for all of us as individuals and organisations, the invitation is the same, to turn empathy into structure, story into strategy, and solidarity into systems that last, even in these uncertain times.