Our mission is simple: no more deaths. Thousands of displaced people arrive at borders every year and it is unacceptable that an increasing number are not surviving their journey.
Thanks to the unwavering dedication of thousands of supporters, volunteers and professionals from around the world, we are operating in key areas in Serbia, Bosnia & Herzegovina and Greece to deliver vital material assistance, investigate under-reported harms and build a civil society ecosystem that stands in solidarity with displaced people.
Activities: The Three Pillars of Collective Aid Action
The current crisis demands precise action and collective strength, which is why we are seeking not just to respond but to connect, coordinate, and build capacity across multiple areas of action. These three pillars of action work together and support each other: services stabilise, research dismantles barriers, collective capacity ensures long-term change.
Material Assistance
We provide vital material support including clothes and WASH services where we identify serious gaps in services, material needs and risk of exposure related harm.
People are fighting to survive across Europe’s borders. Direct aid stabilises lives long enough for systems-level action to take root.
Research and Investigations
We collect evidence, monitor human rights violations, and publish reports: ensuring that our findings and data reach relevant stakeholders locally, regionally and internationally.
What is invisible will not be held accountable. Evidence needs to be brought to public attention for the public to take action.
Civil Society Capacity Building
We partner with and resource civil society organisations and leaders across a wide range of borders, co-developing systems to strengthen local responses and solidarity action.
Truly sustainable action is local. When civil society stands together with displaced people, borders can become less deadly.
Strategy: Building Collective Capacity to End Border Deaths
Every year, people die on borders not because help is impossible, but because systems fail.
Our strategy is to close as many failure points as we can through collective capacity: aligning good aid, effective reporting, and vital civic power into one coordinated ecosystem response. With strong strategy, commitment to mutual collaboration and attention to standards, we will build more capable civil solidarity that moves from fragmented efforts to collective action.
The theory of change underlying this strategy is built on a systemic view of the problem we are facing, not charity logic. The crisis is sufficient that we must be pushing every action possible to enable system change. The role of strategy is therefore to ensure that the combination of our activities cumulatively reduce more harms than any of them would individually.
When those with immediate needs receive material aid, organisations generate truth through research and documentation and civil society organisations strengthening support for displaced people, then collective action to address deaths on borders will grow and appetite for accountability will increase.
Your Role: Will You Join?
When you become a regular giver, you are not just donating: you are joining our network of solidarity, standing in solidarity at Europe’s borders.
We are a relatively small team and therefore need the steady support of our regular giving community to continue all the work we do.
Check out our community page to see what else is involved!
Ethos: Method, Excellence, and Solidarity
Our ethos defines how we operate, and it is how we have ensured continued action that is rigorous, multidisciplinary, and uncompromising in standards. Because when stakes are as serious as ours are, “good enough” does not cut it.
Every aspect of our work is grounded in evidence, protocol, and outcome, enshrined in our guiding principles. It is time consuming and difficult to do the necessary planning, testing, and iteration to gather data on what works and then build effective systems of action, but it is vital in every instance. Doing so means we see best practice as the starting point, drawing upon feedback, active research, and needs assessment to develop practice.
As a result, we are equipped to hold ourselves to the same scrutiny we demand from others, ensuring regular and transparent audit and adjustment of our practices. That is how we can begin to do the work we want to do and stand in solidarity with those denied safety who are fighting for a world where protection is guaranteed, not begged for.
History: Our Background
Founded in 2017 as “BelgrAid,” Collective Aid was established to address the evolving needs of refugees and migrants in Serbia. Initially responding to the humanitarian crisis in Belgrade by distributing meals and essential supplies, we quickly grew to become a trusted source of support for those in transit. Today, we have expanded our efforts across Europe, working in Bosnia & Herzegovina, France, and Greece.
Serbia Programme
In March 2017 , the BelgrAID warehouse kitchen was started in Belgrade, the capital city of Serbia, by volunteers from Greece. BelgrAID made food and did ad hoc distros in Belgrade Barracks. By November 2017 Obrenovac was started after the Belgrade Barracks were becoming an unfeasible place for people on the move to gather. Obrenovac, which was named the ‘Azadi centre’, provided lunches and activities, cinema nights etc. as well as some ad hoc aid distros.
In November 2020 , the Belgrade Water, Sanitation and Hygiene centre (WASH) was opened and this became the focus of the project. The Azadi centre was closed and the Belgrade project became oriented towards providing WASH and outreach in the city.
Between July and August 2017 the Serbia programme expanded and opened the project in Subotica, a city in the North that borders Hungary. The NGO called Fresh Response had been running the project and handed over to BelgrAID.
In part of 2018, the shower service at Subotica had to stop, but this was restarted in 2019 . In the period between 2020 to mid-2021 , a big priority for the project was developing the WASH provision. In 2021 the project also received shower trucks from Medecins Sans Frontieres and began distributing food. Distributions thereafter have provided Non Food Items (NFI), WASH and food. Between 2022 and 2023 the Subotica project saw the highest concentration of people on the move every month that Collective Aid has ever seen, making the project extremely large.
This came to an end following developments in Serbia at the end of 2023 , where policing operations and closures of informal settlements reshaped the migration routes in the country. We made the decision to down-scale our project in Serbia by focussing operations in Subotica and using our remaining resources to additionally address the needs of people on the move in Bulgaria. This allows us to provide NFI and WASH services directly or supply partner organisations on a flexible basis following changing needs throughout Serbia. The project increasingly focuses on advocacy in Serbia and has begun visiting Bulgaria to gather information, conduct needs assessments for advocacy and with the aim of establishing a permanent field project in the country.
Bosnia & Herzegovina Programme
In August 2018 , the organisation began to examine the possibility of a Bosnia & Herzegovina programme and started a project in Sarajevo, the capital city of Bosnia & Herzegovina. The organisation began to send volunteers there in September 2018 . The Sarajevo project initially started as a street kitchen. By November 2018 the project had also started a camp kitchen called Usivak kitchen. Until mid 2019 BelgrAID ran in both the street kitchen and the camp kitchen in Sarajevo alongside Aid Brigade and BAB. BASIS did NFI distributions and provided showers. CADUS provided medical aid.
In mid-2019 the Sarajevo project decided to stop running the Usivak kitchen. The project was handed over to local Bosnians who still use our recipes. Anecdotally, the guys in camp say food is still good but the contractors don't smile at them any more! Since then, the Sarajevo project primarily runs mobile NFI distributions.
In summer 2020 , the Sarajevo project began the glasses project in tandem with an optician in the city. This project only runs for a couple months at time, but whenever funding allows this is also a service that the Sarajevo project provides.
France Programme
In May of 2019 Choose Love asked Collective Aid to take over their warehouse and operations in Calais, a city in the far North of France that is the closest point of France to the UK. When Collective Aid took over, the project was providing NFI to the main camps in the Calais, Dunkirk and Grande Synthe areas from the Auberge des Migrants warehouse with the other Auberge des Migrants organisations. In November 2019, the project moved to the ‘New Warehouse’, where they worked with Project Play and Refugee Women’s Centre relatively closely.
In April 2020 the project took on some of the responsibilities that other organisations had stopped providing due to COVID19 related complications, this was when the project provided phone charging and water at distributions.
In June 2021 the project along with the majority of other projects in the Calais area lost a donor that had been providing the vast majority of the funding and was also evicted from volunteer housing. Later that summer the project was also asked to move out of the warehouse. The project moved back to the Auberge des Migrants warehouse in November 2021. The project implemented a tent distribution system (known as tent drops) based on referrals from partner organisations. This system, with some modifications, continues to this day.
In March 2023 the project opened a WASH Centre in the centre of the city. The project was the first widely available WASH provision ever provided in the Calais area. The expansion represented a huge development for the Calais programme overall.
In March 2024 the clothes distribution project ended due to a lack of funding and we refocused our remaining funds to continue the WASH and tent distributions as these gaps are not covered by other organisations. In the same month the Calais Town Hall ordered the WASH centre to close.
Despite a months long fight against this decision in which we implemented a mobile laundry service, this order ultimately created to much strain on our capacities to continue services and in Winter of 2024 we paused our operation in Calais. We decided to pause in order to ensure partner organisations received the resources and support they needed to continue providing tent distributions over the winter, and now that we have successfully handed over operations we are currently assessing where service gaps exist that would justify reopening of operations in Calais.
Greece Programme
In Spring 2024 Collective Aid was invited to take over a NFI free shop project from another organisation on Lesvos. Given the worsening situation on the island and our experience providing adaptive NFI services, we decided to redirect a portion of our Serbia budget to this new project. We are currently in the process of opening the project.
International Programme
From the beginning of 2022 the Executive Director began to develop a team of international managers that would come to be called the International Programme. This team initially consisted of the Fundraising and Grants Manager and the Strategy & Impact Manager, who existed to facilitate and support the development of the country programmes and also to coordinate the strategy of the organisation overall. In April 2023, the programme hired an Advocacy and Communications Manager and in October 2023, the Calais Human Resources Coordinator took over the volunteer recruitment and welfare responsibilities for the Balkan projects, eventually becoming a member of the international programme as the Human Resources manager. In March 2024, the programme incorporated their newest position and welcomed the Donations Coordinator, who works on material donations and warehouse management for all projects.
We exist because European borders remain sites of systemic violence. People fleeing war, persecution, and climate disaster deserve more than charity: they deserve justice. Until the policies that force people into suffering are dismantled, humanitarian aid alone is not enough. We are not here to exist indefinitely, our ultimate mission is to make our own work obsolete, to build a future where displaced people no longer die on borders.
Until then, we will continue standing in solidarity with those forced to move.
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Have any questions? Would like to get more details on our work, the projects we have or how we make it all happen? Send us an email!
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