What do singers Rita Ora and
Jamie Cullum, architect Richard Rogers and author and actor Ben Elton have in
common? They all have “refugenes” – they
are either refugees themselves or have family members who were forced to leave
their countries.
They
took part of Refugenes, a short film
launched today by the charity Help Refugees as part of a campaign to raise
awareness of the number of people in Britain who are from refugee backgrounds
and to highlight how they contribute to modern society and culture.
In
the video, Ora, Cullum, Rogers and Elton join other prominent popular culture figures, such
as Bella
and Esther Freud, Noisettes’ frontwoman Shingai Shoniwa, singer Yasmin Kadi and
model and blogger Naomi Shimada in discussing their own refugee origins and how these
roots helped shape who they are today.
These people have all risen to the top
of their fields, but each has a personal story or family history involving
displacement from lands that were no longer safe due to war or tyranny – a fate
shared by some 8.6 million people worldwide in 2015 alone.
The campaign is also encouraging the
public to share their own #Refugenes stories in order to paint a fuller picture of
who are Britain’s refugees and how they have contributed to the society we live in
today.
Refugenes sets these
stories against the backdrop of the current refugee crisis, which reached
cataclysmic proportions in 2015 with the escalation of the Syrian civil war and
unrest in the Middle East and Africa caused by the rise of ISIS. Since then
over one million people have sought refuge in Europe.
The charity Help Refugees was created in the autumn 2015 in response to the needs of refugees in
the ‘Jungle’ refugee camp in Calais. It has now grown into one of the leading
humanitarian organisations dealing with the refugee crisis in Europe, having
helped nearly half a million people with both basic amenities and quests for
resettlement.
