The Power of Resilience: Turning Setbacks Success

The Power of Resilience: Turning Setbacks Success

By: Yome Jimmy

The Power of Resilience: Turning Setbacks into Success

Life doesn’t always go as planned. One moment, things are running smoothly, and the next, everything changes. For refugee women, these changes are life-altering. They leave behind their homes, families, and careers to start over in new countries, often without knowing the language or customs.

At Creshendo, we’ve witnessed firsthand the extraordinary resilience of refugee women as they navigate these profound challenges. Their stories go beyond survival, they’re powerful testimonies to the human capacity to transform devastating setbacks into new beginnings and, ultimately, into success.

Why Setbacks Hit Refugee Women Particularly Hard

Before we dive into how resilience helps overcome setbacks, it’s worth it to understand the unique challenges refugee women face.

When refugee women experience displacement, they often shoulder multiple burdens simultaneously. Many arrive in new countries having survived violence, loss, and trauma. On top of this emotional weight, they frequently become the primary caregivers for children and elderly family members while navigating complex immigration systems, language barriers, and cultural differences.

Research shows that refugee women often face additional gender-specific challenges, including limited access to education and employment opportunities, increased risk of gender-based violence, and expectations to maintain cultural traditions while adapting to new environments. Many have professional qualifications that go unrecognized in their new countries, forcing them to start over professionally while managing family responsibilities.

Despite these extraordinary challenges, refugee women demonstrate remarkable resilience. 

The Key Components to Refugee Women’s Resilience

Through our work at Creshendo supporting refugee women from different countries, we’ve observed several key components of resilience that help transform profound setbacks into stepping stones for success:

1. Perspective

Resilient refugee women have a particular way of viewing challenges. They see setbacks as temporary rather than permanent, specific rather than universal, and changeable rather than fixed.

This perspective doesn’t minimize the pain of displacement or the frustration of systemic barriers, but it does keep these challenges from becoming all-consuming.

2. Sense of Purpose

Having a clear sense of purpose provides an anchor during turbulent times. For many refugee women, this purpose often centers around creating a better future for their children, contributing to their new communities, or eventually helping others who face similar challenges.

Creshendo’s skills development programs help women reconnect with existing purposes or discover new ones. Through workshops that identify transferable skills and explore creative adaptations of previous careers, women find meaningful ways to move forward even when their original life plans have been disrupted.

3. Social Connections

Perhaps the most powerful factor in resilience is having strong, supportive relationships. The isolating experience of being a refugee in a new country makes these connections particularly crucial.

Creshendo’s community building initiatives create spaces where refugee women can form friendships, exchange practical information, and celebrate cultural traditions. These connections combat isolation while creating networks of mutual support that enhance everyone’s resilience.

4. Problem-Solving Skills

Resilient people approach setbacks with a solution-focused mindset. Rather than getting stuck in rumination about what went wrong, they ask, “What can I do now?”

Refugee women often demonstrate extraordinary creativity in problem-solving, finding innovative ways to navigate unfamiliar systems and overcome barriers.

Barriers to Resilience

It’s important to acknowledge that resilience isn’t solely an individual quality. Systemic factors like discriminatory policies, limited access to resources, and prejudice create additional barriers that make bouncing back from setbacks much more difficult for refugee women.

This recognition has two important implications. First, when we talk about building resilience, we must acknowledge that refugee women face far greater challenges than many others due to these systemic inequities. Their resilience in the face of these additional obstacles deserves particular recognition and support.

Second, truly supporting resilience means working toward systems and communities that provide equitable access to the resources that foster resilience, things like quality healthcare, educational opportunities, safe housing, and supportive social networks.

This is why Creshendo combines direct support for refugee women with advocacy work that addresses systemic barriers. Our advocacy initiatives work toward more inclusive policies and practices.

How Displacement Becomes a Catalyst for Growth

When refugee women are in the midst of displacement and resettlement, it can be hard to imagine that anything positive could emerge from such profound disruption. Yet time and again, with appropriate support and resources, many discover unexpected strengths and opportunities through this journey.

This doesn’t mean we should romanticize the refugee experience or minimize the real hardships involved. Rather, it means approaching these challenges with an openness to the possibility that displacement, while never chosen, might eventually become a catalyst for meaningful growth and new directions.

The phenomenon of “post-traumatic growth”, the positive psychological changes that sometimes emerge from struggling with highly challenging life circumstances, is something we frequently observe among women in Creshendo programs. Women often report:

• A deeper appreciation for life and clearer priorities
• More authentic relationships and greater compassion for others
• A stronger sense of personal capability and self-reliance
• Recognition of new possibilities and paths not previously considered
• Deeper spiritual or philosophical understanding

None of these positive outcomes erase the trauma of forced displacement. But they do suggest that with proper support, refugee women can not only survive but ultimately thrive in ways they might never have anticipated.

How Creshendo is Helping to Build Resilience

At Creshendo, our programs are designed to strengthen the five key components of resilience while addressing the specific challenges refugee women face:

1. Cultivating Self-Awareness Through Storytelling

Our digital storytelling workshops create safe spaces for women to reflect on their journeys and recognize the strength they’ve already demonstrated. By crafting and sharing their stories, participants develop greater self-awareness about their responses to challenges while reclaiming narrative control over their experiences.

2. Practicing Flexible Thinking Through Skill Adaptation

Our career adaptation workshops help women identify how their existing skills can be applied in new contexts. This process builds cognitive flexibility, the ability to see situations from multiple perspectives and identify alternative paths forward when original plans are blocked.

3. Developing Growth Mindsets Through Incremental Challenges

Creshendo’s language acquisition programs and digital literacy training are structured around incremental challenges that build confidence through gradual mastery. This approach nurtures a growth mindset—the belief that abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work.

Each small success reinforces the idea that current limitations are temporary, not permanent—a crucial distinction for maintaining hope during difficult transitions.

4. Building Support Networks Through Community Hubs

Our community hub in Turkey creates a space where refugee women connect across cultural backgrounds while accessing practical resources. This hub host cultural celebrations, skill exchanges, and informal mentoring relationships.

By fostering both practical support and emotional connection, these networks become powerful engines of collective resilience, allowing women to draw strength from each other during challenging times.

5. Enhancing Physical Wellbeing Through Holistic Programs

Recognizing that physical wellbeing forms the foundation for emotional resilience, Creshendo integrates community building activities, vocational workshops, and accessible exercise programs into our community hub. We also partner with healthcare providers who offer trauma-informed care for refugee women.

During particularly stressful periods, these basics of physical wellbeing become even more critical for maintaining the energy needed to navigate complex challenges.

Join the Creshendo Community

If you’re a refugee woman looking to connect with others on similar journeys, or if you want to support the resilience and success of refugee women in your community, we invite you to join the Creshendo community.

• Volunteer as a mentor, language partner, or skills trainer at https://creshendo.org/volunteer 
• Donate to support our programs at https://creshendo.org/donation
• Advocate for policy changes that remove barriers for refugee women 

Together, we can transform setbacks into stepping stones for success, not just for individual refugee women but for entire communities that benefit from their strength, talents, and contributions.