
Written by Melissa Dalton-Bradford
Melissa published an article with BYU (Brigham Young University) Magazine about the nature of volunteer refugee work in central Germany. You can read the original article by clicking here.
Excerpt:
Eyes speak. That morning at the Limburg refugee camp, I heard volumes.“Guten Tag,” I said, tipping my head toward the man sitting alone at the end of the table. One of the dozens of refugees I’d met while volunteering as a German teacher in camps near Frankfurt, he had drawn my attention more than once.
He was hard to miss: his shoulders were nearly as broad as the table; his steady, weighted gaze from under the brim of his baseball cap gave him the air of a once-imposing but now-cowering animal, bruised from repeated blows.
His eyes had been watching, speaking while I worked. Two minutes earlier, a dozen or so children and I had been rowdily chant-singing “Kopf, Schulter, Knie, und Fuß” (“Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes”), our laughter like splashes of yellow in the slate-gray atmosphere of the camp. But after an hour of language instruction and songs, the kids had lost interest and run off the instant there was a lull.
Why consent matters to us (and why it should matter to you too).
It is especially important to provide accurate information as to how a photo will be used and obtain consent when working with refugees.
Stories are Changemakers: An Instagram Live with Sarah Kippen Wood
Sarah Kippen Wood, Former Executive Director of Their Story is Our Story (TSOS), shares how stories connect and lead to change in an interview with Darien Laird, our Director of External Media. Sarah gives us an inside look at how TSOS functions and shares how telling her story helped her fight a stage four cancer diagnosis.
Uniting for Ukraine: U.S. Sponsors Needed
Just as citizens in Europe and the U.K. have heroically supported displaced Ukrainians by opening up their homes or securing other housing, assisting with school enrollments, employment needs, and language learning, Americans now have the opportunity via the Welcome.us Sponsor Circles program to directly help newly arrived Ukrainians. The United States has committed to welcoming 100,000 Ukrainians temporarily for a period of two-years and the ability to apply for employment authorization in the U.S. as long as they have a U.S.-based sponsor to petition for them.