In 2023 and 2024, SolidariTee worked to develop and formalise our strategy for the 2024-26 academic and financial years. We are delighted to share this with you as a public commitment to this vision and to these goals, both to hold ourselves to high standards of accountability, and to provide a greater insight into why we do what we do.
Our trustees worked to build on consultations and perspectives shared by student leadership teams, our NGO partners, conference attendees, and other people with lived experience of the asylum system in Greece and the UK. The product is a four-pillar approach that encompasses the ways we seek to make change, both for those seeking safety today, and for all those who move in five, ten, and 20 years' time through our focus on education and longer-term culture change.
The world that SolidariTee is part of today looks very different to the context in 2018 and 2019, when we were first registering as a charity. In the intervening years, a global pandemic and fire destroying Europe's largest refugee camp, war in Ukraine, ongoing bombardment in Gaza consistent with genocide, and successively hostile policies in the UK ranging from the Rwanda plan (fortunately now scrapped) through to the decision made to house asylum seekers on a floating barge known as the Bibby Stockholm have all contributed to a shifting political landscape. We saw this particularly in the summer of 2024, with racist riots across the UK fuelled by misinformation about refugees and asylum seekers.
Though there were some years where Greece received relatively fewer numbers of people seeking safety, in 2024 more than one person every 10 minutes reached Greece in search of safety. This is the largest number of people since 2019. Despite this, there is little to no media attention regarding the experiences of refugees and asylum seekers in Greece here in the UK. Moreover, today's average first-year university student was just eight or nine years old when the height of the 'refugee crisis' in 2014 and 2015 featured at the top of the media and international humanitarian agenda.
What this means is that today, SolidariTee's team and community has to work that much harder to make connections between global conflicts, displacement, and persecution with issues of migration and asylum. As such, our strategy focuses on communicating the relevance and importance of taking a global, holistic view on solutions to support those forced to flee their homes. With each passing year, fewer international donors have an interest in supporting legal and mental health programmes for refugees in Greece, which also means that SolidariTee's funding is becoming more and more critical.
Our awareness-raising work, support to holistic legal aid programmes in Greece, and efforts to improve the quality of trauma-informed legal aid provision in Greece and beyond are all articulated in our current strategy, which we will regularly monitor our progress against.
To everyone who contributes to making this work possible, thank you. It takes enormous clarity of thought and commitment to one's values to support people caught up in highly politicised crises with little international attention, and to intentionally educate oneself about the experiences of people and communities that don't make the media headlines. We, and all of our partner organisations, are deeply grateful for your support.
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