Fundraising

Stone Soup Refugee Project – 2021

Dear friends and supporters of Stone Soup, As director of the Stone Soup Refugee Project, I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks for your support of this innovative, empowering endeavor as well as of Stone Soup’s broad aim to provide a platform for creative young people across the globe. The Stone Soup Refugee Project was inspired by Sabrina Guo, a Stone Soup contributor, prolific writer and extraordinary activist, and the collaboration she pioneered with Another Kind of Girl Collective, a non-profit which provides an artistic outlet to displaced Syrian girls. Since the launch of the Refugee Project, we have partnered with seven organizations providing on-the-ground support to children living in refugee camps, and those resettled in host countries. Through these partnerships, we have collected over three-hundred pieces of artwork and writing by refugee youth. These creative works are currently on display in our newly created web portal for the project, which you can explore here: https://stonesoup.com/refugee-project/ Our vision for the project: “Will be the next day better.” A drawing by a Syrian refugee child of her idea of a good future. Over the course of the past year and half, we half successfully overcome the limits of the Covid-19 pandemic as we forged relationships, through the help of Zoom, with organizations serving refugee youth in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, as well as in Turkey, Lebanon, and Greece, and even along the Syrian refugee trail to Western Europe through the Balkans. In the next phase of the Refugee Project, as we continue to collect creative works by refugee youth for display on the Refugee Project portal of our website, we are also working to expand and deepen our collaboration with current Refugee Project contributors. Our central goal for these ongoing collaborations is to facilitate a substantive, ongoing engagement between our broad Stone Soup audience and the artists and creative works displayed through the Refugee Project. We hope to achieve this goal through several endeavors, including: 1) Delivering creative writing teaching content to young people in refugee camps and those resettled in host countries. This content will be developed by members of the Stone Soup team and designed to help young people to share aspects of their daily lives and experiences that they wish to share; and 2) To facilitate collaborative learning experiences, such as the exchange of creative writing and artwork, between our Stone Soup contributors from refugee backgrounds and our broader audience. As an example of this type of expanded collaboration, planning and logistic development is currently underway between myself and key stakeholders at Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya, for me to deliver a portion of my Anthropology of the Everyday summer camp (which I have taught over the past two summers) to young people living in Kakuma Refugee Camp. I will deliver this workshop initially through mobile phone exchange via Whatsap, and once Covid-19 protocols allow, through interactive video conference sessions. The initial delivery of this workshop is set for this coming September, after which we hope to facilitate a creative exchange of the writing and artwork produced by young people who took the workshop in Kakuma Camp, and those who signed up through Stone Soup. Afghan girl, age 10, in a Serbian refugee camp in Bogovadja. Support the Project: To make this vision a reality, we need your help. We have set ourselves a target goal of $10,000 to pilot the program. These funds will go towards the development of workshops delivered to young people in refugee camps, the facilitation of creative exchanges between young people, and the work of collecting and publishing more material on the Refugee Project website. In addition, funds will be used to support our Refugee Project contributing organizations and the young people they serve in the ways in which they deem valuable, such as purchase of supplies and possible scholarship funds. As we have said many times before, the media so often portrays refugee youth as the subject of a narrative. The Stone Soup Refugee Project provides a platform for these young people to tell their own stories, in their own voices. Please donate toward our goal and help us to empower these young people. Thank you for believing in us and our mission. Your continued support has made this project possible. Sincerely, Laura Moran Refugee Project Coordinator Donate to the Stone Soup Refugee Project Recent Work by Refugee Children Mixed media, paper mache using old exercise books, tissue paper, paint, glitter, pen Hala was in Greece for almost 3 years with her father and sister. Her mother was waiting for them patiently in Germany. She loved to draw more than anything. They were living in a squat when Love Without Borders met them and placed them in a house. They used art as a way to heal as well as to pay for basic necessities during their time in Greece. They were finally transferred to Germany to be reunited with the rest of her family. Now Hala is studying German and sends photos of his paintings from time to time, as well as leaving sweet voice messages in German. Khalid recalls: all his friends say something nice about him, that he helps people. He offers friends food, or anything they need. He jokes with his friends. Sometimes during the activity he forgets himself and starts to sing. He is a very natural, grounded personality, very instinctual. He does things without thinking. When asked about the painting, he said it is about nothing. He said, it means nothing. He said, black is for scariness, and red is for blood. Ezgi asked, is this a painting of a monster? The boy said, yes. Ezgi said, let’s talk with this monster. What you want to say to him? The boy said, I am not afraid of you. Ezgi said, what did the monster say to you?The boy said, the monster says, no, you are afraid of me. Answer him, Ezgi said.The boy said a loud, laughing voice, I am not afraid of you!

The Stone Soup Refugee Project

About our Fall 2019 fundraiser Help needed for our upcoming Refugee Special Issue Dear friends and supporters of Stone Soup, As some of you know, we have recently embarked on an exciting endeavor. In 2020 we plan to launch a special issue of Stone Soup which will feature the creative work of children in refugee camps around the world. We have been fortunate enough to partner with Laura Doggett and her art initiative, “Another Kind of Girl Collective,” (AKOGC) which has been working for the past five years to give teenage girls in Za’atari Refugee Camp in Northern Jordan the ability to express their inner worlds through film documentation. We want to raise a total of $5,000 to support the Special Issue and associated projects. Make it possible for teen refugees to mentor the younger children Khaldiya, Younid, and Marah are three teen girls who live in Za’atari Refugee Camp. They have agreed to lead a two-month-long photography workshop for children with the intention of generating submissions for our Stone Soup refugee issue. Here is where we turn to you, our generous donors. $2,000 will pay Khaldiya, Younid, and Marah a stipend, purchase workshop supplies, and mail back issues of Stone Soup  to Za’atari so the children can hold the magazines in their hands and see what is possible for them, too. With your help, our partnership with “Another Kind of Girl Collective” will foster creative inspiration and guidance. Support the wider project: production, web development, and printing Funds raised in excess of this amount–the other $3,000 of our goal–will be used to support the costs of publishing additional material from this group of children on our website, and towards the costs of producing the Special Issue of Stone Soup magazine, as well as providing print copies of the Special Issue to all of the participating camps. It will also contribute towards a campaign to publicise their work. If we exceed our fundraising goal, we might even be able to sponsor additional workshops. We have set ourselves a target goal of $5,000. Will you help us reach it? So often, media portrays refugee children as the subject of a narrative. This project gives them agency to tell their own stories. Our hope is to make it easier for people and the international press to access creative work that may inspire action. Please donate toward our goal and help to empower the voices of refugee children. Thank you for believing in us. We wouldn’t be where we are today without your support. Sincerely, Margie Chardiet Refugee Project Director Donate to the Stone Soup Refugee Project Be inspired by Stone Soup’s legacy of publishing this kind of work Dear friends It’s a depressing reality that these situations are not new, and that children are always part of the group of people caught up in events outside their control. Creative practice is one of the few outlets these children might have to express themselves and to process and describe what they have experienced. The work Margie Chardiet has been doing for us to build partnerships with people working on the ground in camps is really helping Stone Soup to contribute something towards making their work and the children’s experiences more widely known and understood. Stone Soup has a history of publishing extraordinary work by children who have lived through the trauma of war and fleeing their homes, both their art and their writing. Visit our website to see images produced during the Cyprus conflict, and some powerful, harrowing writing by child refugees from Vietnam. This is the kind of work your donations will help to make possible, and to make public via Stone Soup. Please consider helping us with a contribution towards this Special Issue, and the on-the-spot work that will empower creative refugee children today. Thank you. William Rubel President & CEO Donate now to support child refugee creativity Not convinced? Be inspired to help by our current Stone Soup writers Our young readers and writers in the United States and elsewhere have provided us with inspiration, information, and fantastic blog posts throughout this project, which we first proposed in early 2018. Some of them have already donated to this campaign with both money and time. You can read some of their insights on our blog. Sabrina Guo has been particularly prolific. Read her pieces on Za’atari Camp and the crisis for refugee children more generally, as well as some personal reflections on the Stone Souprefugee project, and a specific piece on AKOGC and Laura Doggett’s work. Ivy Halpern’s review of the book Refugee by Alan Gratz also offers some reflections on the experiences of refugee children from Syria and at other points in history. Follow our young writers’ lead and help us to support and encourage their contemporaries in camps around the world. Thank you. September 2019 Donate today 

Reaching Marginalized Communities

About our Spring 2019 Fundraiser Help Stone Soup Expand its Reach   Our spring 2019 fundraising drive is focused on raising additional funds to support our programs and partnerships reaching out to kids living in challenging circumstances. All the money raised through this appeal will be devoted to finding new ways to seek out and support the harder-to-reach Stone Soup readers and contributors of today and tomorrow. We want to encourage participation in the world of Stone Soup by children in less privileged circumstances. We are already working on a few initiatives that contribute to this broader goal, and your donations will help us to continue and expand those projects. Reaching a Wider Contributor Base Via Public Libraries We charge a small fee for submissions to Stone Soup, which covers the costs to us of using an online submissions management system and contributes to the staff time it takes to carefully read and assess every single submission that comes in to us–which is what we do. Our individual subscribers have free submissions whilst they are subscribers, and the submission fee is not a barrier to our core readership. However, for many families, a personal subscription to Stone Soup is not affordable, and the submission fee is off-putting or just plain impossible for children living in less privileged circumstances. To help us find and reach a wider audience we want to extend the free submissions benefit to Public Libraries, so that all children who use their local library’s Stone Soup subscription to submit their work to us will be able to do so free of charge. We hope and believe that this public access will help us to help less advantaged young people send us their work, free of any submission fees, for consideration by our Editor. Donate to widen Stone Soup’s reach As well as asking for cash support, we are also devoting all the money raised from sales of a vintage copy of Stone Soup Magazine to this campaign. In a recent re-organization we found a box of 60 copies of a very special issue from our archives–the “Special Navajo Issue” from March/April 1989. The 1989 special issue was comprised solely of short stories, poetry, and artwork by children living on Navajo reservations. Looking at this issue again, we felt it was an inspiring example of the kind of work Stone Soup has done and can do to bring often unheard children’s voices into the open. We have put those issues on sale in our online store, and have committed to putting all proceeds from its sale towards our current efforts to reach marginalized communities. With this money, we can work on more initiatives like our extension of free submissions to Public Libraries. We have 60 copies of the magazine available in our online store, at $15 per copy, and if we sell them all we’ll raise $900 from that alone. You can find and place your order for the issue in our online store. Help us support the writers of tomorrow