An air of optimism hovers over the olive grove. Men from Africa, Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq are busy building a wooden structure that will serve as a new shelter. There is quiet concentration, banter and even a bit of laughter as they bang nails into the beams.

The scene is a far cry from the chaos of the adjacent refugee camp, a place so congested it has earned the Greek island of Lesbos the unenviable reputation of being home to the worst migrant facility in Europe. “When people live in a structured environment, they behave in a structured way,” says Adil Izemrane matter-of-factly.

The Dutch humanitarian is on a double mission, one that is as much “about host as hosted”. “Our aim is to create jobs and new economies that benefit both.”

The olive grove is an experiment in “model living”. The wood for the shelter, like the cement, stones and mesh used to terrace this once chaotic strip of land – occupied in the spillover from the main camp – have been acquired from Moria, the hillside village up the road. The hope is that the collaboration will enable fraternisation between locals and refugees at a time of rising resentment, anger and fear on the island.

“People here showed such resilience, such generosity in such overwhelming circumstances, they deserve better,” says the 41-year-old, whose group, Movement on the Ground, has set itself the goal of taming the ills that have inflamed passions. “They deserve support.”

Three years have elapsed since a million men, woman and children landed on Lesbos in the largest movement of humanity since the second world war.

Adults and children walk inside the Moria refugee camp on Lesbos Island in November 2018. Photograph: Soelvi Iren Wessel-Be/AFP/Getty Images

Initially kindness and compassion prevailed, virtues that were rewarded on Saturday when islanders received the inaugural John McCain award “for their heroic support of refugees fleeing mayhem throughout the Middle East and Africa”.

Announcing the prize, the late US politician’s widow, Cindy, said she hoped recognition of the “sacrifices that so many ordinary people have made” would inspire others to “stand up for what is right”.

But the outpouring of sympathy witnessed at the height of the drama has given way to darker sentiments – born, Izemrane believes, of policies that were ultimately misguided. Emergency aid was tailored exclusively to those landing on Lesbos’s shores. Locals, he says, were overlooked. In neglecting their concerns, the seeds were sown for antipathy and intolerance towards refugees – sentiments exploited by an ascendant right and echoed across Europe by fear-mongering politicians.

“In the end what we saw on this island was an invasion of good intention,” he says. “By only focusing on the refugees and not the local community who were just as much a part of the crisis, it created polarisation.”

Nikos Trakellis and Adil Izemrane in Moria. Photograph: Helena Smith/The Guardian

It falls to Nikos Trakellis, a jocular man in his early fifties who is president of Moria’s 1,100-strong community, to handle the toxic mix of emotions among his compatriots. No place in Greece, he laments, experiences the migrant crisis as close up.

“Every day there’s some incident, it might be a [farm] animal being stolen, a car being damaged, a house or shop being broken into, a fire,” he explains. “It’s hard. We’ve already suffered a lot from the economic crisis in this country.”

Despite the onset of winter, people keep coming, traversing the sea that separates Greece’s easterly Aegean islands from the Turkish coast. At least 70 men, women and children arrive in Lesbos daily although often that number swells into the hundreds.

Newcomers, invariably, are taken up through the hills to Moria and the malodorous barbed-wire topped detention centre that stands barely two kilometres from the village in a former army barracks. Periodic attempts to reduce numbers – the camp is currently home to nearly 10,000 people, more than three times its capacity – are greeted wanly in the face of constant arrivals. In conditions repeatedly described as deplorable and depraved, stories of despair are rife.

Children stand behind a fence inside the Moria refugee camp on Lesbos. Photograph: Soelvi Iren Wessel-Be/AFP/Getty Images

“They are people, just like us, who have mothers and fathers but before [the refugee crisis] we weren’t the victims of plunder and theft,” says Trakellis. “Today, villagers are afraid to walk the streets after dark, they no longer feel safe even in their homes. So far, there’s been no physical violence but as long as [refugees] are trapped in that camp, there is the chance that - ‘bam!’ – the whole place will go up.”

Izemrane, himself the son of Dutch-Moroccan immigrants, was among the wave of idealists who felt compelled to move to Lesbos in 2015 after being shocked by the image of the Syrian toddler, Alan Kurdi, lying limp and lifeless on a Turkish beach. He arrived with his “giving food” truck exactly one month later.

But experience has taught him that such assistance is no longer relevant in a drama of shifting tones. These days, Movement on the Ground operates more like a tech start-up than a traditional aid organisation, believing that if refugees are seen solely as victims of war, without a sense of purpose or ability to re-engage in social life, it will keep them in survival mode and cut any chance of integration.

For Izemrane the path forward lies in little things. At the olive grove priority has been to given to providing basic services, installing internet access and running water, as well as instilling a sense of order. Overnight, he says, fights in food queues stopped when the queues were abolished and appointees from tents were assigned the job of fetching food. To defuse tensions refugees are dispatched weekly to clean the waste trail often left around the village.

But it is jobs that the NGO is intent on creating. Some 47,000 refugees and migrants have arrived in Greece in the first ten months of this year, 37 % more than a year ago, according to the European border agency, Frontex. Although most asylum seekers on Lesbos will eventually leave – if their requests aren’t rejected and they are returned to Turkey – the vast majority will likely remain in Greece, making the need for literacy, numeracy and other skills imperative to integration.

On an island with an unemployment rate of 25%, the Dutch group has employed ten locals, including teachers and sports coaches, who oversee computer classes, English classes and football training both for unaccompanied minors and the children of low-income locals.

Antonis Zeivekis with his student Kwizera, aged 18, from Burundi, under a sign that reads ‘coexistence and communication in the Aegean’. Photograph: Helena Smith/The Guardian

In an office building in the heart of Mytilene, Antonis Zeivekis teaches young refugees how to navigate the web as part of one of the group’s outreach programs. “I teach them to teach each other and it’s extremely rewarding,” says the previously unemployed Greek mathematician, 25, posing for a picture with his Burundi student, Kwizera.

The approach that has been so successful in a region still regarded as the frontline of the refugee drama that European officials would like to see it replicated elsewhere. In an age of rage many hope policies of inclusion and integration will ultimately take the sting out of the resentment that permits populism to thrive.

“Including host communities, as is being done here, is the only sustainable way forward,” says Manon Albert, who focuses on migration policy at the Dutch embassy in Athens. “We are looking into ways to reproduce [this approach] in other parts of Greece.”

• This article was amended on 21 November 2018. An earlier version said that according to Frontex, “over 40,000 refugees have arrived in Greece this year – 150% more than last year”. Frontex’s figures show that 47,000 refugees and migrants arrived in Greece in the first ten months of this year, 37% more than a year ago.