Collaboration

Eligibility and conditions have been determined by the Shelter Meeting community through plenary vote and through feedback forms at each meeting. Please see our Shelter Meeting governance section for how this works.

Eligible to participate are governments, donors, IASC clusters, United Nations bodies, International Organisations, the Red Cross Movement, national and international Non-Governmental Organisations, development actors, independent humanitarian specialists and academic research bodies.

Members of the armed forces or foreign offices of governments are not normally eligible to participate in Shelter Meetings as, in accordance with the Red Cross Code of Conduct, both the Shelter Meeting and Shelter Centre endeavour not to act as instruments of government foreign policy.

All profit-making organisations are ineligible to attend the Shelter Meeting. Proactive efforts have been made to engage the private sector, however, such as through the Shelter Partners Forum. Shelter Centre is always open to receiving expressions of interest for supporting interfaces between the humanitarian and private sectors through independent fora.

To encourage sharing and free discussion, presenters normally allow their presentations to be summarised and shared online, however Shelter Centre events are held generally under the Chatham House Rule:

“When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.”

Please contact us at [email protected] with any thoughts or suggestions.

A theme is agreed for each event. Presentations may either be related to the theme, or be generally relevant to our shared community of practice, meeting the objectives for the Shelter Meeting  which have evolved as part of the community feedback process to encompass the following.

• Inclusivity: who else should participate and how might we engage them?
• Prioritisation: what gaps exist in current technical guidance and resources?
• Collaboration: on-going projects that would benefit from peer-reviews
• Consensus: share good practice and lessons learned from the field
• Capacity: announcements of publications, events or trainings

All Shelter Meetings are supported by live video conferencing, accessible worldwide through your web browser. This means that wherever you are in the world, you can still make a presentation and join the conversation. Shelter Meetings are currently the only inter-sector technical forum available enabling inclusive, global participation by diversifying methods of connection, such as pioneering live video conferencing and linking past presentations to related content, to aid learning. Supporting a wider audience opens discussion up among all humanitarians, linking global, regional and national stakeholders.

The Shelter Meeting was developed into a global sector forum from peer review meetings for the publication ‘Transitional Settlement: Displaced Populations’, managed by the University of Cambridge Shelter Project.

Each Shelter Meeting is hosted by a different agency, offering focus for those agencies internally, to colleagues, and externally, as a demonstration of their focus. Shelter Meeting hosts and co-hosts kindly offer assistance for venue and costs and often provide rapporteurs.

Hosts have included CARE-UK, DFID, HFHI, IASC GSC, ICRC, IFRC, IOM, MSF, NRC, SDC/HA, UNDP, UN-Habitat, UNHCR, UNOCHA, USAID/OFDA and World Bank GFDRR. Please contact us at [email protected] if your agency wishes to host a Meeting.

Since 2011, funding has been on an ad hoc basis, including: the IASC GSC, NRC, UNOPS and USAID/OFDA. Continuity of funding is sought for Shelter Meetings.

2006 – 2011, Shelter Meetings were funded by DFID through programme funding.

2004 – 2006, Shelter Meetings were funded by DFID as project funding through the University of Cambridge Shelter Project.

On the last day of the Global Shelter Cluster Annual Meeting on Friday, 08 July 2022 we had the Shelter Meeting 22. Thank you to everyone who joined us online and in-person. A special thank you to IASC Global Shelter Cluster, IFRC, InterAction, UNHCR, USAID/BHA for hosting and funding this year’s Shelter Meeting.

At this event, 280 participants registered online and in-person. Presentations were held by local non-governmental organisations,  international non-governmental organisations, Red Cross Movement member organisations, UN agencies, IASC Global WASH Cluster, donor representatives from ECHO FCDO and USAID BHA, and academic institutions.

If you want to stay informed about the upcoming Shelter Meetings, other sector events and updates, please sign-up to the Shelter Centre newsletter.

Presentations 

All presentations of the Shelter Meeting 22 are now available on the Humanitarian Library. Hundreds of past presentations are being migrated into channels on the Shelter Meeting Collection on the Humanitarian Library’s Shelter Meeting Channel, presented next to thousands of related publications and tools, also offering opportunities for Library users to comment upon and discuss each presentation.

Feedback

In order for us to know how to improve future Shelter Meetings, we ask you to fill this online feedback form by 02 August 2022.

The form has space for you to seek for more information about the presentations (see agenda), as well as suggest themes for subsequent Shelter Meetings and ways in which the event can better serve you – it remains your Meeting.