We are delighted to be able to share our annual report for the 23-24 academic year, with enormous thanks to the hundreds of volunteers, supporters, and staff at our partner organisations in Greece who made the achievements contained in the report possible. With case studies from real clients, the report shares details of the successes, stories, and areas of priority focus that make each of our partner organisations uniquely impactful.
"I'm really relieved I spoke to you, otherwise my head would have exploded from thinking!"
quote from client at Fenix Humanitarian Legal Aid, one of SolidariTee's partners
It also covers some of the highlights from our UK-based activities, focused on uniting a large, bold community of students and young people in support of the rights, freedom, safety and agency of all those forced to flee their homes or to cross borders in vulnerable situations. Finally, the report also outlines the achievements of our innovative professional development opportunities. In 2023 and 2024, we have facilitated the research, development and pilot of a bespoke capacity strengthening programme based around a framework known as the Therapeutic Legal Assistance Model. So far, we have been able to train more than 40 legal aid and other NGO professionals using this model.
Together, these three pillars of our work have centred around our 2024-26 strategy, which we seek to build on in 2025 and beyond.
The need for our work
In 2024, more than 60,000 people sought safety in Greece. This equates to more than one person every ten minutes. It is also the largest number of people recorded to have arrived in a single year since 2016.
SolidariTee was set up not long after that, at a time where the media was full of stories about the 'refugee crisis' in Europe, and public solidarity with refugees was at an all time high. In the intervening years, increasingly hostile political rhetoric has become commonplace, and media coverage has dramatically reduced.
This means that for today's young people in particular, access to accurate, up to date information about the experiences of refugees, and opportunities to meaningfully and ethically support people seeking safety, particularly abroad, are often quite hard to come by. At the same time, funding available for our partner NGOs has continued to shrink.
For both of these reasons, all of us at SolidariTee feel incredibly fortunate to be able to contribute towards filling key gaps in the legal and mental health support available for refugees in Greece, and deeply grateful to be able to do so primarily through a community of committed, critically-thinking young people. We are entirely reliant on donations to fund this work, and with no paid staff or office space, we are able to send funds directly to the grassroots partners who need them. We look forward to sharing more about our work in 2025 and beyond, and we remain incredibly grateful for every person who has attended an event, worn a t-shirt, shared a post, or donated to our work. SolidariTee runs on collective action, and these individual actions, when combined, make what we and our partners do possible.
If you have any questions about our work or would like to learn more, please send alexa@solidaritee.org.uk an email at any time.
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