You may have noticed that we skipped last month. We will publish the newsletter on a monthly bases as a summary of the previous month.

This past week was Giving Tuesday. Please consider our GoFundMe fundraiser and share this with your contacts. This helps us support scholarships for local organizations to improve their writing and help get their voices heard. We are 1/6th of the way there. We are only looking to raise $1,000. Anything raised above this will go towards future scholarships and our other many Tea Leaf Center activities.

Give now and help refugee and migrant youth learn to make their voices heard. Any any amount helps. Donate $1, $5, or more.

$20 covers one participant for one day

$100 covers one participant for the entire writing course

Our research and advocacy writing courses are designed as 5 intensive half-day classes. They are hosted for a full week in each location. Participants will learn to write:

 If your organization would like us to host this course specifically for your staff email us at researchmatters@thetealeafcenter.org.

We had our first successful Board of Advisors meeting in November and welcomed Aung Khine Min, Dr. Pakamas Thinphanga, Simon Dickinson, and Dr. Mark Ritchie officially to the Tea Leaf Center. They all bring unique experiences to the table and we are so very grateful for their help and advice so generally given. More about them will be up on our site soon.

In addition to our board of advisors, we welcome Anna Thomson as our first intern. We look forward to working with you in the coming year.

The Tea Leaf Center's name is officially reserved for Thai registration. We have begun the registration process and will hopefully be a legally registered entity in Thailand by the New Year. Special thanks to our two silent partners. We literally could not have done this process without you two.

Finally, in order to remain transparent with our work, keep an eye out for some upcoming documents on the website. We will make our funding prospectus, end-of-year report, and strategic plan available.

Mote Oo has a series of educational resources available on their website. Most resources are available in English and Burmese and are available as teacher handbooks and student books. Their most recent publication is Research Skills that will be available soon. Follow them on their Facebook page to learn when they will become accessible.

Audio is an excellent way to share stories from the ground increase engagement with stakeholders, and make research accessible. Tenaganita is a Malaysian based human rights organization. They recently started a podcast series called Invisible Malaysia that discuss and share the human rights situation on the ground through conversations with refugees and experts. They currently have 4 episodes with future episodes used as a platform for refugees to share their stories and be heard.

Witness has a ton of resources at their online library and blog on topics such as advocacy, interviewing, and data collection.  Resources include Concealing Identity in Interviews, tips for interviewing victims of gender-based violence, curriculum on video documentation from start to finish in Video for Change, and many more.

In a perfect world evidence-based decision making can rely on research that provides ALL the information and data necessary to make informed, unbiased decisions. Like it or not, some level of uncertainty will always exist, be it imperfect evidence, limited time-frames, or simply not enough data.The Oxford Policy Management blog published an insightful piece on Uncertainty: making decisions without all of the evidence.

Hope-based communication is important to push. As researchers, advocates, and those in the human rights field, positive communication does not always come naturally. Much of what we witness, stories we choose to share, and the news we consume often come from dark places. Open Global Rights has an important guide on hope-based communication: from shifting the conversation to solutions rather than problems to emphasizing support of heroes rather than pitying victims.

Teacher Focus released a report titled Bridges: Participatory Action Research on the Future of Migrant Education in Thailand. This report is a well written piece that in addition to being well written, gives credit to the field researchers who conducted the work. Bridges highlights important gains in migrant education in Thailand, such as increased quality and access to education for migrants children. It also provides some useful recommendations grounded in excellent research, such as the need for legal recognition of Migrant Learning Centers, Community Education Liaison officers, Migrant Teacher accreditation and security, etc.