LL THIS WEEK
Standing in solidarity
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olidariTee, an international student-led charity, has launched a new t-shirt in a campaign to support the refugee crisis. The group has a presence at 53 universities across six countries and the University of Liverpool has recently joined the campaign. The charity has now revealed this year’s printed t-shirt in a bid to raise money for refugees and asylum seekers internationally. The charity was founded in 2017, by Tiara Sahar Ataii, a first-year student at the University of Cambridge. It began after Tiara volunteered with a Non-governmental Organisation providing legal aid in Greece and decided she wanted to raise funds for the refugee crisis. Using her student loan, she had t-shirts printed to sell around campus and eventually the campaign spread to other universities. Over the first two years of campaigning they reached donations and sales of over £43,000. The charity emphasises the importance of supporting refugees that are left with no choice but to flee dangerous conflict and war zones, who are then put in inhumane conditions in over-crowded and dangerous makeshift camps across Europe. SolidariTee offers grants to individuals and NGOs, to provide legal-aid for refugees and asylum seekers to gain the right to education, accommodation and healthcare. The charity uses refugee or refugee-inspired artwork as the basis for
By ROMY WILSON their t-shirt designs. The inspiration for this year’s t-shirt design came about following a trip that Alexa Netty, SolidariTee’s executive director, took to find out more about the work NGOs were doing in Thessaloniki, northern Greece. Alexa came across a life-sized design in a community centre called Elpida Home and said: “I was immediately really moved that it had been created by a group of refugees and asylum seekers as part of an art workshop, with each person standing against the wall in a different pose whilst the others traced their outline on the paper.
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he group then coloured in the overlapping segments of the outlines to create a unified design, which, to me represented the diversity of histories and experiences amongst the refugee and asylum seeking community, and yet the connectedness of a shared experience of being forced to flee one’s home, something no one should ever have to experience.” MPs including Caroline Lucas, Johnathon Bartley, Tim Farron and Jeremy Corbyn have shown their support for the campaign. Now more than ever, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, refugees and asylum seekers are in desparate situations requiring financial and physical support from NGO’s. Poppy Cleary, 21, head representa-
tive of the University of Liverpool’s SolidariTee team, said: “Greek Asylum Service closed for several weeks, upon reopening we were dealing with unprecedented levels of need." This has made the day-to-day running of things even more difficult than it was before for them, so SolidariTee hopes to be able to raise even more money to provide them with more assistance in working through the backlog. She added: “In March, a grant of £10,000 was provided to Kitrinos Healthcare. "Kitrinos is a medical aid NGO working on an emergency COVID-19 preparedness plan in Moria camp, which was at the time home to over 20,000 asylum seekers, on an island with just three ICU beds.” Poppy says that a great way to educate yourself on the refugee crisis is making sure “you look at a variety of news sources and how the refugee crisis is being reported, and look out for what information is missing and what media outlets might not be telling you”. She said: “By understanding the refugee crisis better, it is then much easier to speak to family and friends about what is going on; if you are informed it’s much more likely someone will listen to you. “Also, you can look out for petitions to sign on a variety of matters and posting things on your social media profiles about the refugee crisis shouldn’t be underestimated in its effectiveness." Poppy added: "You never know
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If you are informed it's much more likely someone will listen
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Photos © Nazy Raouf 9
