#StandUp4Migrants – stories that celebrate a larger ‘us'

Throughout 2022, the UN Human Rights #StandUp4Migrants campaign focused on bringing people together around shared values and interests to find common ground. By supporting local events and projects that bring together people from the community, it unlocks so much potential and opportunity to build inclusive societies.

To mark International Migrants Day (18 December), we’re highlighting here some of the local events that took place this year where we collaborated with so many partners including migrants, illustrators, muralists, musicians, designers, activists, chefs, and local community members.

“We are all made from the same ingredients"

MyGreat Cookbook was created based on the richness food can bring to the migrant story with its power to bring people together around a shared meal, to tell stories about someone’s journey and to help people find common ground.

Download the MyGreat Cookbook and set a date with friends and family: Cookbook download

MyGreat story

UN Human Rights in Bangkok brought #StandUp4Migrants to Australia through the MyGreat Story campaign to build human rights-based narratives on migrants and migration. MyGreat Story uses the universal bonding powers of food and storytelling to promote inclusion of migrants. It entails a video series created in partnership with LoveFrankie, featuring eight popular Australians across the fields of sports, fashion, food, art, and culture. Together they represent the diverse migrant community in Australia coming together to cook and share their migration stories.

MyGreat Story launched in October 2022 in Sydney with a live event centred around a shared meal. On the occasion, UN Human Rights and Love Frankie also partnered with Google News to organise a media workshop (pictured below) for junior journalists and journalism students in Australia on building inclusive narratives of migrants in news reporting.

Stories of climate change and migration

Showing the potential and opportunities for positive change is core to our narrative change work and at the centre of our Climate Change and Migration graphic series. Rather than triggering fear about what happens if we don’t tackle climate change, we illustrate what the hopeful future we share looks like when we work together. In this series, UN Human Rights collaborated with Argentinian illustrator and activist Magda Castria on graphic stories, Climate Change and Migration: Growing a Shared Vision of Hope and Climate Change and Migration: Restoring the Sacredness of Migration that illustrate beautifully what happens when migrants and local communities come together to find solutions to tackle climate change benefitting humans and nature alike.

Mural of hope in Mexico

To bring people together to find common ground and tell stories through art, we worked with Venezualan artist CamdelaFu (Camila de la Fuente) to create a mural, “Camino de esperanza” (‘Path of hope’) in Mexico City, Mexico. In partnership with Casa Refugiados and UNHCR, the Refugee Agency, de la Fuente led a workshop with migrants and members of the local community to share their experiences of migration and create a hopeful vision of the future. The mural reflects the hopes and dreams of these stories, which CamdelaFu painted together with workshop participants.

Migration as a World with This Alien Nation

Together with author and creator of This Alien Nation, Sofija Stefanovic, UN Human Rights curated an event featuring authors, musicians and comedians sharing their own stories of migration. The event was held in parallel to the International Migration Review Forum of the UN Global Compact for Migration in New York City, providing a space for individual migrant voices to be heard and celebrated.

“Often migration is reduced to a word, when I like to think of it as a world,” said Stefanovic. Listen to Stefanovic’s insight on finding common ground on our #StandUpForMigrants Podcast.

Cultivating Common Ground

In South Africa, UN Human Rights collaborated with Three2Six to cultivate common ground. The story shares how migrants and local community members have come together to tend a local community garden. The vegetables grown in this community garden fuel the school lunch program, which is attended by both local and migrant children.

 

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