Highlighting Successful Integration Cases

You are not. There are three separate problems in that request and consent only answers one of them.

The first is that agreement given to a mentor is not free of the relationship. A woman who has been helped by your service, and who may need it again, is not in a neutral position when you ask her for a photograph. Ask through someone she is not dependent on, make no as easy as yes, and accept it the first time.

The second is that consent is for a specific use and it expires in practice even when it does not on paper. A story on a project website is indexed, copied and translated, and it is still there in five years when her situation has changed. Agree in advance how she withdraws it and who removes it after the project ends, and write that down. Under the GDPR she can ask for erasure, and somebody has to be able to act on that when the project team no longer exists.

The third is what the story does to her. Success stories tend to be written as a person overcoming her circumstances, which quietly says that the women without a story did not try hard enough. She becomes the proof of the programme rather than someone who used it.

So what do we publish instead? The funder does want something concrete.

Publish the pattern rather than the person. What kind of barrier came up, what was done about it, what changed and over how long, with the identifying detail removed and the practical detail kept. That is more useful to another service than a portrait, and it does not put anyone in a search engine.

Where you want numbers to sit alongside it, use published ones and say where they come from. The gap in employment between immigrant and native-born mothers, the over-qualification rates for non-EU women, the share of migrant women in work: these are measured across countries and they let a reader see whether your case is typical or unusual. A single story cannot do that, and it is often used as if it could.

If somebody genuinely wants to tell her own story, that is different and it is hers to tell. The test is whether she raised it or you did.