Zach Thomas has been working for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the UN Migration Agency, in man-made crisis contexts for the past seven years. Each crisis is very unique but with similar results: macro events such as political instability, economic collapse, and war have occurred in a country/region, which have put the most vulnerable people in an even more dire situation. Without ability to secure basic needs such as food, water, medicine, or shelter they were forced to flee their homes, cities, and/or countries and are dependent on host countries and international aid. Zach’s primary job has been to support liaison efforts with donor agencies such as USAID, write and edit project and program proposals and reports, and manage teams of project developers to ensure IOM has sufficient funds to meet the needs of the world’s most vulnerable migrants.
Iraq
After graduation in 2013, Zach took a chance with a three-month contract in Amman, Jordan to work for the IOM. As the Assistant Officer, he started off with project development and reporting, supporting IOM mainly through his writing and editing skills to fundraise for life-saving Iraq programs. As the displacement crisis due to the takeover of much of Iraq by Armed Opposition Groups (AOG), most notably ISIL, Zach transferred to Erbil in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. For more than three years he lived in Iraq and worked in both project development and project management functions, eventually managing over 20 million USD in funding to provide internally displaced persons (IDP) with multi-sectoral assistance such as shelter, non-food items, and camp coordination and camp management activities.
Turkey
Zach transferred to IOM’s Turkey Mission to establish the Project Development and Reporting Unit in an expanding Mission, which grew 6x in size from 2015 to 2020 due to many new project funds. His office in Turkey responds to two emergencies: the Syria Crisis inside Syria through shipment of humanitarian goods across the Turkey-Syria border to reach millions of vulnerable Syrians, and the emergency/resilience response for Syrians inside Turkey, which number more than 3.5 million as of 2020. In nearly three years in Turkey, his unit grew from two to nine employees, with Mission funds doubling to nearly 200 million USD to support multi-sector efforts such as livelihoods, shelter, non-food items, and protection programs.
Venezuela
In March 2020, Zach transferred to the IOM Venezuela Response Team in Panama, which oversees the regional response to the crisis in Venezuela and covers 17 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean where Venezuelans have fled. Venezuelan migrants sometimes walk for weeks or months on highways and back streets to reach their preferred destination in the Americas and Caribbean. He is again tasked with establishing a Program Support Unit, this time covering project development, reporting, communications, and monitoring & evaluation functions of the office. His new office coordinates the regional response, so is less of an on-the-ground role but more supporting country offices that conduct frontline emergency actions. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated vulnerability of Venezuelans inside and outside Venezuela and limited his office’s ability to reach people in certain cases. At the moment, Zach is in Reno, NV working remotely as Panama continues to impose a ban on international flights.