Professor Muhammad Yunus, the founder of “Grameen Bank” decided to reverse conventional banking practice by removing the need for collateral and creating a banking system based on mutual trust, accountability, participation, and creativity. The “Grameen Bank” provides credit to the poorest of the poor in rural Bangladesh, without any collateral as a cost-effective weapon to fight poverty.
Many historic town and city centers in El Salvador have suffered years of neglect and a lack of investment. Through a program of training, funding and collaboration, a network of organizations including FUNDASAL (the Salvadorian foundation for development and adequate housing), FESCOVAM (the Salvadorian federation of mutual aid housing cooperatives) and FUCVAM (the Uruguayan federation of mutual aid housing cooperatives) has worked to help the local community to set up the first five mutual aid housing cooperatives in the city’s historic center.
In the City of São Paulo, the "Municipal Council of Immigrants" allows immigrant residents to participate in the formulation, implementation and monitoring of the city's policies.
The Municipal Council of Immigrants was created by Municipal Law 16.478/2016. Its members are of 22 different nationalities and were officially invested in last August to serve the 2018-2020 term. The Council is linked to the Municipal Secretariat of Human Rights and Citizenship.
The city of Mannheim in Germany is developing a ‘living together in diversity’ alliance across over 300 local actors including schools, cultural centres, sports centres, etc. with a view to jointly deciding, with all including migrants, how society would like to ‘live together’.
The Greater Amman Municipality, the French Agency for Development, the French Red Cross and the Jordanian Red Crescent launched a joint strategy to strengthen the resilience of vulnerable populations, improving living conditions, expanding social communication between refugees and the local community, and establishing community-based activities and opportunities for capacity building in the Badr Nazzal district.
From the late 1990s until today, the municipality of Barcelona has followed an intercultural strategy to implement inclusive measures for local migrant integration. These measures were reinforced to welcome asylum seekers as the population tripled between 2015 and 2017, through a range of measures, including:
In Tangier, Morocco, the municipality is working closely with civil society initiatives to promote social cohesion and access to services for migrants given the lack of deconcentrated services of the ministry in charge of migration.
In Lyon, the Agence Lyon Tranquilité et Médiation (ALTM), an agency of mediation promoted by the municipality, helped to decrease social tension in Gabriel Péri square, which plays a central role for migrant populations in the city. This initiative deploys uniformed mediators to promote long-term social cohesion in a specific and ‘problematic’ area of the city. This state-led intervention exemplifies how social cohesion can be strengthened through a collective, holistic approach that aims at building bridges rather than promoting exclusionary security measures.
The City of Chicago (USA) has developed public-private partnerships to create a local protection fund whereby civil society organisations can work with immigration lawyers so that all migrants know exactly which services they can and cannot access depending on their status.
The City of Lisbon’s One Stop Shop that brings together under one roof and streamlines services to immigrants and ensures open access to everyone (regardless of status) has been an inspiration for other cities.