“For me, it’s all about helping and empowering women. To help them move from dependency to be able to live independent life, to not feel isolated, to feel included in society and in the community where they are living.” This is what drives Nolene Sheppard in her work as the project leader of a new Convocation Refugee Grant Program (CRGP) pilot project at St. Thomas Becket in Hamburg.
Empowered Living for Women is an empowerment program for refugee and asylum-seeking women in Hamburg who are experiencing isolation, barriers to employment, or difficulty navigating a new life in Germany. It combines personal development coaching and mentoring with workplace readiness training, practical German-language support, and community-building activities.
The CRGP project grew out of other work Sheppard was doing to support Ukrainian refugees living on the outskirts of Bucharest and Magnificat, a women’s empowerment group in her congregation. “I spoke to a couple of organizations who said: ‘why not do something for refugees in Hamburg?’ I love supporting women – I’ve done it all my life – and so that’s how Empowered Living for Women in Hamburg started.”
Sheppard is a certified personal development and NLP coach and a British registered nurse who was born Trinidad and Tobago. She spent most of her professional life working in health care management in the UK before moving to Germany 12 years ago. “I know this feeling of isolation.”
At the moment, she is still putting the group together. The aim of the project is to support 20-25 women, which will also indirectly affect their children and their family life. Because they want to include women of all different nationalities – current participants come from Syrian, Ukraine and the Sudan – many of the activities are done in English. “English is the easiest place to start because our first goal is to give them a community where they have a voice and talk about whatever problems as they are facing.” Another part of the coaching, though, is “how to live in Germany” and that includes German language support.
“This is a project I’m really starting from scratch. I want to give them strong support. A lot of these women have so many skills and abilities – back in Ukraine, they were bank managers and professionals and now they are working in a kitchen,” Sheppard said.
Recently, she was traveling back to Hamburg following a visit to the Ukrainian refugee group in Romania, and her suitcase didn’t arrive. “And I thought: ‘I can go buy whatever I need to replace it.’ And these women are longing for their belongings, longing to go back to the family they left behind. I think that’s part of the story we need to tell; we need to be more grateful. We cannot do anything to stop the war, but we can do something to help those that are displaced.”
Team of volunteers for the Empowered Living for Women” programme -18th October 2026
Workshop with the “Empowered Living for Women” programme held 4th November 2026.