A Decade of Synergy: Advancing Justice through Partnership

Reflection by Christy Fujio, Synergy for Justice Executive Director and Co-Founder

On Synergy's 10-year anniversary, it's a great pleasure for me to take this opportunity to reflect on our journey. I never aspired to establish or be the executive director of a justice organisation. It was not part of any 5-year, 10-year, or even 20-year plan. My passion has always been working with actors on the ground to support their work and increase access to meaningful justice for underserved people, and I could have happily remained a technical advisor on justice issues until retirement. However, by 2014-2015, I and my fellow Synergy co-founders were increasingly disillusioned by the way that many INGOs (including some that we worked with) worked with local communities, dipping in and out with no commitment to sustainable outcomes on the ground, offering very little true partnership with local actors, and using patriarchal and colonial modes of communication and stakeholder engagement. 

So we, a group of five women from different countries and with different professional backgrounds and expertise, started discussing the idea of creating our own NGO to support local actors in the Syrian context, where we had been working with doctors and mental health professionals since 2012 to conduct forensic medical evaluations of survivors of torture and sexual violence. We did not have plans to expand our work beyond Syria - we all had other roles in various organisations - but we were determined to create a structure that would allow us to partner with Syrian documenters and obtain funding that would support their work in ways that they believed would be beneficial to survivors of torture and sexual violence. We also knew that additional support, beyond documentation training, was necessary for both the survivors of human rights violations as well as the documenters and other service providers living in crisis contexts. We named ourselves “Synergy for Justice” because we know that justice outcomes are optimised when multiple actors and multiple disciplines (legal, medical, psychosocial, and organisational development) come together and synergise their strategies to advance justice and support survivors of human rights violations.

Now ten years later, the doctors and lawyers that we initially trained and mentored have recently completed the first forensic medical documentation training inside Syria. This achievement is something we could not even imagine back in 2015. Their training and documentation methodologies align with international standards and best practices for survivor-centred, trauma-informed care, and they are doing it on their own without our support. This is what sustainable outcomes look like, and we are proud to be part of their journey.

I cannot say I had any idea what Synergy would look like 10 years after founding. To be honest, I didn’t initially have a vision beyond partnering with and supporting justice actors in the Syrian context. The early years were crisis mode as we navigated challenges and learned. Our funding and geographic scope remained small and limited to justice and accountability for Syria. Five years in, it finally hit me that we have a strong model and an incredible roster of experts that we could use to advance justice and support survivors in other contexts. Now we have programming and partnerships in eight countries: Syria, Türkiye, Nepal, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Colombia, Ukraine, and Palestine. We do not undertake work in any context unless we have a local partner to guide and co-develop plans for implementation, and unless we are certain that we can add value to the local context without duplicating work that is being done by local actors.

I am proud of what we have achieved, and I am grateful for the support of so many people and institutions over the years, including our partners, board members, roster of experts, and our deeply committed core team, who have remained dedicated to Synergy and its mission despite the many challenges we face, including this year’s funding crisis.