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We create opportunities across borders for collaboration and empowerment between "others." Our project is co-run by Aws Jubair, a refugee from Iraq, and Josie Ygnatowiz, an educator and activist living in New Orleans. Our project directly supports refugees living in the MENA region that have been displaced due to their identities. Our goal is to lift refugees stories so their struggles can be heard and felt on a global platform. We want to build a community across borders that works to support, empower, connect and uplift refugees through mentorships, employment opportunities, scholarship programs, legal advice, creative collaboration and advocacy.
Before COVID-19, our work focused on connecting people across borders through a traveling installation that gave people living on one side of the world an opportunity to talk to refugees, Youth, students, artists, displaced peoples and poets on the other side of the world. Our dialogue sessions focused on humanizing those affected by the US Muslim Ban and bringing awareness to the discrimination they face as displaced people that do not have the freedom of movement that is taken for granted byso many. We hope to again turn public spaces into a places for listening, discussing, thinking beyond borders and building global community in the future.
past events
December 2018 | New Orleans, Louisiana
Coffee Shop Dialogue Series
Monday December 10 - Mojo Coffee
Living Our Solidarity with the Middle East
Dec. 2nd 2018 | Grow On Urban Farm New Orleans, Louisiana
Watch Will Picard (Washington, D.C.) Executive Director of the The Yemen Peace Project update us on the crisis in Yemen and current legislation to pull the U.S. out of the war
Watch the De-Otherizing Dialogue Project's co-director, Yazan al-Shakoohhy, discuss the mental health crisis among displaced youth in the Middle East
Watch Bashar Balleh (Istanbul, Turkey) tell his story and discuss the real consequences of the U.S. Travel Ban for Syrian refugees
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