The CAFAR Centre for Creative Health
We’re building something different — reimagining what a space in a refugee settlement can be, and what it can tell the people who live in it.
WHY IT MATTERS
The places we live shape how we feel about ourselves.
Most refugee stories begin the same way. Bare ground. Barbed wire. Buildings left to decay — provisional structures, flooding drains, spaces that were never meant to last. This kind of architecture speaks. It tells people who have already fled war and crisis that they are temporary here — that this is holding-ground, not a home.
THE VISION
We believe a settlement can be built to say something different.
The CAFAR Centre for Creative Health reimagines the very architecture of displacement — replacing decay and provisionality with a space that is dignified, green, permanent, and owned by the people who use it. A place where gardens climb the walls, where children are safe, and where creativity, art, movement, play and nature heal what words can’t reach.
And this isn’t a design imposed from outside. The need for it surfaced through our creative work with the community itself — the same process that shapes everything we do. The Centre is Creative Action, applied to the spaces people live in.
WHAT IT HOLDS
One space, many kinds of care.
More than a building, the Centre is a place for the kinds of care a community needs to thrive — and to feel, at last, that it belongs.
1
Creative health & MHPSS
Safe, creative spaces for mental-health and psychosocial support — the heart of the Centre’s work with children and young people.
2
Child protection
A secure, welcoming environment where children are safe to play, create and simply be children.
3
Vocational & creative skills
Training and creative-skills space that builds livelihoods and futures within the community.
4
Community & cultural life
A gathering place for performance, events and cultural life — where the whole community comes together.
BUILT TO SUSTAIN ITSELF
A centre that pays for itself.
The Centre is designed not to depend on aid, but to help fund its own future — so that it can stand, and serve, for the long term.
The result is true stability, real ownership, and lasting change — a model built to be reimagined and rebuilt in other settlements, too.
Owned & run by the community
A gathering place for performance, events and cultural life — where the whole community comes together.
THE DESIGN
See what we’re building.
Blueprints and architectural renders of the Centre — coming soon.
Blueprints coming soon
Renders coming soon
Gardens and Grounds coming soon
HELP US BUILD IT
Help us build it. Help it last.
The CAFAR Centre for Creative Health is our most ambitious project yet — and we are looking for the partners and supporters to build it with us. Whether you can fund a room, a garden, or the whole vision, your support will help lay foundations that last for generations.
To discuss partnering on the Centre, email simon@cafarfoundation.org