Thessaloniki

At the beginning of this year, three of our Robins travelled to Northern Greece to provide assistance in the acute crisis of the displaced people stranded there. Since the closure of the Balkan route in March 2016, tens of thousands of refugees have been living in an unknown number of official and unofficial refugee camps in the region around Thessaloniki.

People from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries are surviving in these camps. Many of them are children and young people.
Due to the harsh winter, we decided to travel to the region and join forces with other organisations on the ground. The first port of call was the English NGO Help Refugees. This organisation, which is based in a disused warehouse near Thessaloniki, is currently supplying over 20 camps with food, clothing, medical care and shelter for 16,000 refugees.
In order to find the most sensible investment opportunities for the donations we collected, we took on various tasks in the warehouse for several weeks and thus gained a deeper insight into the structures of refugee aid in Northern Greece and also got an insight into the hopelessly inadequate response of state institutions to the precarious situation.
We quickly realised that many projects gratefully accepted the flexible support of the Robins because we were a mobile and efficient working group. This gave us the opportunity to initiate several long-term projects with the help of our active and financial support.

Specifically, we were able to support the following projects with both manpower and the donations we collected:

Soul Food Kitchen

A Slovenian organisation that prepares and distributes several hundred meals a day for the Softex camp near Thessaloniki and for homeless people on the streets of the city.

Help Refugees

The expansion of the outer area of the warehouse complex to provide additional space for NGOs from all over the world that gather around the warehouse, as well as the financing of a Dignified Distribution Shop. These are clothing stores that will be set up in the camps. This is a measure to give the camp residents back small consumer decisions. They can ‘shop’ for food and clothing using a points system that works like a credit system, giving them a small amount of freedom that is often lacking for refugees who depend on donations. Instead of clothing and food simply being distributed to people, the residents can regain some of their self-determination. Soul Welders: Due to the acute emergency of refugees stuck in Serbia in freezing temperatures, we were able to provide financial support to the organisation set up specifically for this purpose. The donations went towards the construction and installation of stoves that allow the survivors outside to warm themselves without being constantly exposed to toxic smoke.

Refugee Support

At the military camp in Alexandria, we spent two weeks setting up two classrooms and designing and conducting English lessons for the adult residents. We did this together with the organisation Refugee Support, which takes care of all aspects of the camp residents' daily lives. In the meantime, the school has expanded to such an extent that children can also attend Arabic classes in the morning and anyone who is interested can attend German classes in the afternoon. We are still in contact with the school management and are planning to work with them again this summer.