The input phase, the week of practice, brainstorming and ideas realization, has finished. This part of the program became for our team – me, Weronika and Jasmine – a time of challenges, learning and unforgettable moments. We are all from different countries – USA, Ukraine and Poland and this made our team work even more interesting in terms of experience and knowledge. So what did we manage to achieve during this time? What was good and what should be improved? How we are going to continue our activity in our home countries?
At the beginning of the output phase it was difficult to imagine how we would manage to do everything during such short period. Furthermore, we worried about how to enact our ideas within the prescribed timeline. Our topic “Migrants/refugees” was quite broad and we struggled to fully understand the complexities of each similar but distinct group. Establishing a core idea and project motif has been a continual challenge for us as we all had so many creative ideas. It also became difficult to determine our target group and the correct messaging that would be meaningful to them. We determined that the term “migrants” includes refugees, asylum seekers, and labor migrants so it was not an easy task to concentrate on one narrow topic. But after long discussions and consideration we decided to advocate for refugees rights by making a campaign focusing on eradicating hate speech against refugees and minorities in Poland, specifically on a social media platform.
But can a Facebook page or website really make a difference in catalyzing social change, especially when it comes to the refugee issue? The simple answer is “yes” and our team managed to prove it. Nowadays social media is a very important part of our everyday lives and there are thousands cases when the online campaigns or initiatives catalyzed social movements and changes. Very often, social media is the first place where people received their news and take stances on current debates and topics. The FreeRefugee team set an ambitious goal to launch the virus meme to make people think, be sensitive and react to the social problems relating to refugees in their countries. Where does hate speech come from? Why is there so much hatred towards refugees? What steps should be taken to prevent hate speech and its manifestation into hate crimes? We were looking for our audience to think of their answers to these questions. Hate speech is often a result of ignorance and misunderstanding, and to get rid of it we should provoke talks, spread the knowledge and break stereotypes, which are the reason of hatred.
We decided to put a stress on the visual content of our website and facebook page, as we found it much more effective way to present such uneasy topic. The image is very powerful when accompanied with strong words. It makes people reflect and think over the things to which they were indifferent of neutral before. Our facebook page got more than 300 likes and 4.6 views, which we think is a quite good result for 8 days. Furthermore, we managed to contact a few NGOs in Warsaw who are working on refugees’ issue. Among them was the NGO “Fundacja dla Somalii” which is coping with the refugees and asylum-seekers from Somali. We discovered how the organization for the refugee rights is working here in Warsaw, got a feedback on what we’ve already done and received inspiration to go ahead and do what we are doing.
Actually besides work, we had a big pleasure to spend time together: jokes, pizza time, photos, brainstorming, long off-topic conversations and everyday walks back to hostel. Even when I did not have any mood and motivation to work, after I met girls I got huge portion of inspiration to work even harder. During our campaign we managed to create up to 10 posters with infographics on the hate speech and a series of posters called “IMAGINE”. One of the posters says “Imagine your child falls asleep to the sounds of bombs, not lullabies. What would you do?” The message was that always when we want to judge somebody or say something bad about this person, we should step into his/her shoes. Only in such way we can see the problem from another perspective and at least begin to think and reflect on the issues.
Even though we had visually attractive infographics and images it was not that easy to reach the visibility. We tried to use different facebook groups/pages and spread the information about our initiative. Also on 20th of June there was the World Refugee Day. We decided to make a campaign and designed a picture which people should have put as their profile picture and in such way raise the awareness about the refugees.
As we all have different backgrounds and skills, it helped us to teach and learn from each other. Our team work gave us a change to share what we know and turn it to the practice. There are a lot of other ideas we wanted to implement but, actually it’s impossible to do everything for one week, so we can continue our activity at home. Now, with help of knowledge that we received while working together it would be much easier to realize our action projects. We hope that our initiative will grow and page likes would be not just a simple click but actually an action which can change our society and world for better.
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