Expertise with community roots
Our advisory council deliberately brings together professionals from different regional and professional backgrounds within the Yemeni-Dutch community. That sentence is doing more work than it looks like it is.
One community does not have one voice. Yemenis in the Netherlands come from different regions with genuinely different histories, from different professions, generations and political experiences — and a great many are simply exhausted by all of it. Any organisation claiming to channel that into a single opinion is telling you something about itself, not about the community.
So we built the correction into the structure rather than into a promise. The advisory council spans backgrounds by design. When we tell a municipality "this is what we are hearing", that sentence has more than one kind of person standing behind it — and people who will tell us, bluntly, when we have it wrong.
Advisors bring expertise and challenge. They hold no legal decision-making power — that sits with the board — and they are not associated with any personal views but their own. What they do is make our interpretation harder to get away with when it is lazy.
Come correct us where we are wrong. Seriously.
The reason this council exists before the work scalesWhere we need eyes
These are the areas where a wrong assumption costs someone something real. If your professional life sits in one of them, we would like to hear from you.
Education & youth
Teachers, mentors, IB'ers, youth workers — anyone who sees how newcomer children and their parents meet the Dutch school.
Health & wellbeing
GPs, psychologists, nurses and public-health professionals who understand how distress presents and where stigma sits.
Labour market
Recruiters, HR professionals, entrepreneurs and people who have navigated diploma recognition themselves.
Law & procedure
Lawyers and advisers who know asylum, nareis, inburgering and the machinery people actually collide with.
Social work & welzijn
Wijkteam professionals, maatschappelijk begeleiders and community workers with the cases in their hands.
Research & policy
Researchers, beleidsadviseurs and anyone who can tell us when our evidence is thinner than we think it is.
Not on this list? Tell us anyway. The list reflects what we know we need — which is, by definition, not the same as what we actually need.
Small asks, clearly written down
We have watched enough advisory boards become decorative to be careful about this. The role is deliberately small, concrete, and easy to leave.
A conversation first
We talk about your field, what you have seen, and what would actually be useful for you to contribute. No form-filling before a human conversation.
A written role note
What we will ask of you, how often, and what we will never ask of you — on one page, before you agree to anything. Vague roles produce guilty non-participation.
Small, specific asks
Review a claim in your field. Sit at a table at a dialogue session. Tell us the number we are quoting is out of date. Occasionally co-facilitate. That is the scale of it.
A graceful exit, whenever
Life changes. Stepping back is normal, expected and requires no explanation. An advisory list should reflect who is actually engaged, not who once said yes.
What we ask of you
- Honesty over loyalty. Tell us when we are wrong, including in public.
- Your professional lens. Not a mandate to speak for anyone — just what your work has taught you.
- Non-partisan conduct in this role, whatever your private views. The equal-distance rule applies to all of us.
- Confidentiality where sessions are closed. Themes travel; names do not.
What you can expect from us
- Your name published only with written consent. Never by default, never as a surprise, and removable on request.
- No decorative use. We do not list advisors to borrow their credibility for something they have not seen.
- No political association. You are not linked to anyone's personal views, and nobody's views are attributed to you.
- Real influence. If you tell us a claim is wrong, the claim changes or we explain to you why not.
On listing advisors publicly
We publish no advisor names on this site yet. That is not an oversight — it is the consent rule working. Names appear only when the person has agreed in writing, having seen exactly where and how they will be listed. A page full of names we had not properly asked would be worth less than an empty one.
The chair is open
If you work in one of these fields — or you think we are missing something important — the useful thing you can do is tell us.