Migration & Transformation: Lessons from 2025
Shawgi Ahmed
Shawgi Ahmed, the Managing Director of PLACE Network, reflects on the lessons that shaped 2025 for PLACE and for his own leadership journey. Grounded in moments of deep listening, evolving understandings of belonging, and a renewed focus on care and wellbeing, Shawgi shares how this year challenged PLACE to grow, not by abandoning its values, but by deepening them.
Read his reflection to explore how listening to lived experience, embracing belonging as a collective force, and centering care are shaping PLACE’s vision for 2026 and beyond.
As individuals and collectives tend to wrap up their years and reflect internally on what their key findings of 2025 are, I have tried to put my ideas down in this piece, and what I can clearly say is that 2025 has been a year marked by three concepts: Listening, Belonging, Care and Wellbeing. And believe me, what I mean by these concepts goes beyond people, ideas, and responsibilities.
As global migration dynamics intensified under the current social, political, and ecological shifts, PLACE itself was called to evolve not by renouncing its core values, but by deepening them. This year has required me to hold the complexities we’re facing with care and intention, navigate urgency while standing for our long-term vision.
Much of my journey in 2025 has been shaped by listening. Listening to migrant leaders exploring and co-creating systems that were not designed for them. Listening to creative practitioners who use Arts, Culture, and active presence as tools for survival and resistance. Listening to emerging voices who challenge outdated frameworks and ask sharper, more honest questions about power, Belonging, and responsibility. These encounters have continuously reminded me that leadership is not just about direction, but about creating the conditions for others to lead and thrive, especially those whose knowledge comes from lived experience.
I have also come to understand Belonging more deeply this year, as Belonging is not only a policy issue or a demographic sensation. It is a profoundly human narrative one that connects individual journeys of growth, connection, care, and reinvention with broader collective transformations. and I’m so lucky that at PLACE we see Belonging as a force that reshapes cultures, cities, and realities, and as a mirror reflecting how societies choose to respond to change, with solidarity instead of fear, and with imagination and openness instead of closure.
And yes, care and wellbeing were at the center of my discussions and dialogues that I have had. I’m not shocked to the fact that most of the stakeholders that I’m working closely with had them as a priority too, and this is really helpful for Migrant-led organizations that are working on acknowledging the importance of self-care and wellbeing to all of us across the ecosystem, and the necessity of treating it not as a trendy vibe that will stay for a while and then disappear, but as a foundational element for PLACE network and all the other establishments that stands for rights and justice.
So yes, 2025 was about continuing to dig deeper and expand our collective knowledge as an organization in France, Europe, and beyond. And as they say, “it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey”, therefore, I’m really thrilled to see where these findings will take us in 2026.
