Welcome to issue 49 of the Call to Comms!
This week, meet Magdalena, a TSF staff worker who works to select, fact-check and make accessible reliable information for Ukrainian refugees in Poland.
Meet Magdalena, a Communicating With Communities Officer at TSF
Magdalena, or Victoria Magdalena, is a content manager at TSF, in Poland. She’s Ukrainian, which is one of the reasons she “really loves being involved in the work that we’re doing”.
After finishing a law degree in times of war, Magdalena saw the need to join the humanitarian sector – helping Ukrainian refugees, doing translation work between Polish and Ukrainian. With TSF, she works with integration centers in seven cities in Poland to distribute information.
What do Ukrainian people need when accessing information?
“Ukrainian people are mainly coming to integration centers either to get humanitarian aid, financial aid, or to integrate with the local society in Poland.” Magdalena explains. “We provide information that might be interesting for them, that is needed and useful. We understand that when you come to a different country, it's really difficult to get information, to assess it, to process it. And the most important thing is to know which information is true and trustworthy and which not. So we do it for them, we update it, and thus people can use it and don't worry that it will be flawed or they will be confused.”
How do you select what people want to know?
“To create the content, you firstly need to understand what people need. That involves the conversation with central managers, with people, scrolling on Telegram channels and Facebook to know what people are talking about.”
“Each week, we hear that center managers are thankful to us for doing what we are doing, because we are not only helping people who are fleeing the war, we are also helping the center managers to do their work.”
To listen to her insights on sharing information in times of war, when people are particularly vulnerable to misinformation, check her full interview here.
See you next week!
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