RefugeeYouth

The Barbara Melunsky Refugee Youth Agency (RefugeeYouth) is a charity organisation created by young people for young people, aimed at raising awareness around the issues faced by young refugees and immigrants in the UK and beyond. Since being established seven years ago, it has engaged the wider community through the arts to promote positive change.

The process is transformational and growing, and everyone involved is made to feel part of a family. An atmosphere of safety, creativity and a place of belonging is encouraged through workshops and activities like cooking or simply sitting together to talk. A Youth Leadership Development programme helps young people acquire skills in such areas as health and safety, first aid and projects facilitation, while the organisation also reaches out to policy makers, including Mayor of London Boris Johnson, in its efforts to bring about lasting positive change in people's lives.

In 2008 filmmaker Jon Drever ran a sponsored marathon to raise funds to enable access to digital media for young people so that they might learn and express themselves through creative workshops and digital media projects. The resulting 'media suite' that the original fundraising helped to establish has gone on to become a collective community resource, used by young people to express themselves, experiment and learn through film, music and web productions. These projects, exploring the refugee experience, have been showcased online at www.refugeeyouth.org and at the Refuge In Films festival at British Film Institute in Southbank.

The organisation has also published its own book, Becoming a Londoner, which was researched, written and illustrated by young people at RefugeeYouth. The work created by the Barbara Melunsky Refugee Youth Agency highlights how young people from around the world and from diverse backgrounds can work together to make a positive change in their communities and contribute to the wider society.