Team Refugee in Action

by Karolina Osiak, Robert Tessier, Sasha Zmiyenko

Opening a newspaper these days is quite telling: among the Greece crisis and ISIS horror, there is another poignant issue that makes Europe cry out loud – the situation of refugees. Poland is far from being collaborative on the topic: the government has declined the refugee quotas suggested by the EU and Poles themselves are not too welcoming. A 2013 study (by Centre for Research on Prejudice) shows that as many as 69% of Poles do not want non-white people living in their country. The situation is mind-boggling, especially considering Poland has one of the lowest refugee intakes in Europe. “So what do we do about it now?” – was a question we had to ask ourselves, touched by the current state of refugees. “Let’s take action and make a social campaign!”. And that’s how Team Refugee was born.

Team Refugee is only one third Polish, and only two thirds European. Only one third of us had ever worked on a social campaign, and one third of us had any experience with video or image editing. At least since we only have three people on our team, so there weren’t a lot of people to teach.

 That’s us, lots of sass and not much experience.

We had 10 days – a mind-twisting number that made some of our more panicky team members (*cough* Karo *cough*) get into hyperactive mode. To keep it simple, we decided to focus on a target group we actually understood: young people. We made our goal accessible: change some negative attitudes about refugees. In retrospect, that goal was a little too broad. However, we still think we made a small impact.

With our goal in mind we set up social media pages and worked frantically around the clock. We sent out dozens of press releases, invited friends, posted in other pages, and more. We did all this to combat existing stereotypes and increase the acceptance level of the refugees into the Polish society. We also aimed to have some more tangible results, to check our campaign efficiency: 500 likes was what we pushed ourselves to reach. In the end we didn’t even come all that close really, getting only about half way. But we tried!

 We created content that we hoped would catch the eyes of young people and personalize the struggles of refugees. We came up with two main visuals concepts: „Plans” aimed to show the absurdity of the notion that refugees have a choice and come here to use the social benefits and „Misconceptions” countering the overly repeated arguments about why refugees should not be accepted.

„Plans”















„Misconceptions”

We created a mixture of aggressive images like these ones and more lighthearted ones.

We then met up with two refugees and interviewed each of them. Unfortunately, we obliviously ruined the sound on the interview recordings by leaving the case on the Go Pro…oops. We managed to do a follow up with one of the refugees and used that to create two videos. We also put out a set of images with pictures of her and quotes from the conversation. We used her narrative to bring people closer to refugees on World Refugee Day. People really responded well to the content with her. We’ve received messages and comments with positive reviews. Our Facebook page has gathered not only our families and friends, but also people interested in our campaign. Some organizations have sent us supportive e-mails in response to our press releases, some of them also shared our content.

There was also one woman who works in movie production that approached us during the campaign presentation event in Warsaw and asked for cooperation. She was impressed with our short movies of interviews and the topic we’ve picked. We’re happy to continue our work on this project. Our conversations with refugees were truly important to us and we would love to share the real image of people “hiding” behind the “label” of refugee. Karo (Karolina Osiak) and Sasha (Alexandra Zmiyenko) are trying to design an idea for their action project in connection with this campaign.

Overall, the campaign was difficult but we all learned a lot! Karo (Karolina Osiak) learned to use Photoshop and to think before doing things. Sasha (Alexandra Zmiyenko) learned that networking means a lot and that the Russian internet has everything (especially in terms of acquiring some movie-making skills). Rob (Robert Tessier) learned that social campaigns are really complex and in the future he’ll hire someone if he needs to make one. But most of all we learned that the HIA Polska team is the best team around (we’re a little biased) and we couldn’t have been more lucky than we were to be involved in this incredible program.