Red Cross Blogs

Spreading a positive message for International Migrants Day

By Jamie
December 17, 2010 at 11:45 pm

In October 2010, six young people from the UK and Denmark worked together to write a short positive message and create an image that symbolised tolerance and empathy towards people who migrate, that can be spread through to other young people through Face book and Twitter.

The campaign will be launched in mid-December to coincide with International Migrants Day (18 December).

The idea for a campaign created by young people for young people using social media was part of an exchange of learning between the British, Austrian and Danish Red Cross.

In October this year, a group of six staff and young volunteers from the Austrian Youth and Danish Red Cross visited the British Red Cross in Bristol to share ideas, learn from each other and spark new ideas about how to teach and inspire young people to take action about migration and development.

The exchange is part of Positive Images, an exciting European project led by the British Red Cross. It promotes positive attitudes among young people towards vulnerable migrants, raises awareness of development issues and enables exchange of learning across the EU.

Alongside other British Red Cross volunteers and staff, the Austrian Youth and Danish Red Cross staff and volunteers participated in three days of training about humanitarian education. On the final day the young people worked together on several different action projects exploring the theme of migration. They created art pieces and bags with myth-busting facts about migrants as well as developing positive messages and an image about migrants to spread through Facebook.

By taking such action, young people were able to directly engage and contribute at a small and local scale with the global issue of migration. Simon, a young person from the Bread Youth Project who helped create the positive message for International Migrants Day stated: “I will spread the message of tolerance on Facebook and update my youth project Twitter account with the messages to tell more young people about the campaign”.

Copy the message on Facebook and find the image here and send it to ten of your friends on International Migrants Day on 18 December to spread a positive message about migrants!

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Comments (2) »

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Tags: international migrants day, migrants, migration

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 17th, 2010 at 11:45 pm and is filed under International, Young volunteers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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