Rita Ora, Ben Elton & Jamie Cullum support Help Refugees in new video

Help Refugees, the grass roots organisation working across Greece, the Greek islands, Calais, Paris, Turkey, Lebanon and beyond, today proudly launches a brand new campaign to highlight the contribution refugees and their families make to modern society: Refugenes.

Refugenes launches with the online release of a brand new short film in which prominent figures in popular culture discuss their own refugee origins, and how these roots helped to shape them as people. Among the stars contributing to the video are Rita Ora, Jamie Cullum, Ben Elton and Bella & Esther Freud, each declaring: “I’ve got refugenes”.

They are joined in the film by Help Refugees co-founder Lliana Bird, Noisettes frontwoman Shingai Shoniwa, singer Yasmin Kadi, architect Richard Rogers, Rabbi Harry Jacobi, social entrepreneur Elisa Sednaoui-Dellal and model and blogger Naomi Shimada.

Watch our video here:



Alongside the main film other notable figures to tell their Refugenes stories include Neil Gaiman, Shappi Khorsandi and Hassan Akkad – the driving force behind acclaimed BBC documentary Exodus. You can see all their full stories, and share yours at: www.helprefugees.org.uk/refugenes

These remarkable figures 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, the very fate that befell 8.6 million people worldwide in 2015 alone.

Part of this project will also be to reach out to the wider public and encourage them to share their stories using #Refugenes in order to fully tell the story of how refugees have contributed to the society we live in today.

Refugenes sets these stories against the backdrop of the current crisis, which reached cataclysmic proportions in 2015 with the escalation of the Syrian civil war and subsequent unrest in the Middle East and Africa caused by the rise of so-called ISIS. Since then over one million people have sought refuge in Europe having been driven from their homes by this series of bloody conflicts and the brutal regimes it has created.

Help Refugees started in autumn 2015 as a direct response to the needs of refugees in the ‘Jungle’ refugee camp in Calais – tents, sleeping bags, clothes, food and medicine – and has grown into one of the leading humanitarian organisations in the European crisis, having helped nearly half a million people with both basic amenities and quests for resettlement, and is now providing aid in more refugee camps in Europe than any other grassroots NGO.

Ten refugees displaced by the current crisis have just finished competing in the Olympic Games, another eight are performing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Dear Home Office and one remarkable man, Hassan Akkad, was largely responsible for what many already rank among the most compelling pieces of documentary journalism of all time – BBC’s Exodus.

Thousands more people just like them are currently stateless and homeless in Calais, Lesbos, Athens and countless other locations across the world. Refugenes aims to raise awareness of their current plight, and future potential through the stories of those who trod the same path in previous generations.