CERES: SCORP Cares for Refugees

According to the 1951 Convention regarding the Status of Refugees, in short, refugees are people who fled from their countries and have crossed international borders due to their fear of persecution and do not want any protection from the countries of destination. There are currently around 13,500 refugees registered at the UNHCR office in Indonesia and at the end of July 2020, 56% of the total refugees in Indonesia came from Afghanistan.

During this COVID-19 pandemic, the rights of refugees, which are among the most vulnerable groups even before the pandemic, are very threatened. Therefore, SCORP CIMSA UGM decided to take part in raising awareness as well as indirectly giving a platform for the community to contribute on helping refugees. Our activity is called CERES, short for SCORP Cares for Refugees, with a main topic of condition of refugees during the COVID-19 pandemic which consists of pre-project training, air campaign, and webinar from 14^th-18^th October 2020. To create a bigger impact, SCORP CIMSA UGM opened a volunteering program with a limited quota. In the end, as many as 134 people managed to enrolled in the volunteering program and one of them is a refugee.

Before the air campaign started, we held a pre-project training which was held on 7^th October 2020 and was brought by one of SCORP CIMSA UGM’s Human Rights Trainer, Natalie Audrey Susanto. The pre-project training, which was attended by approximately 145 people, was aimed for CERES’ organizing committee and volunteers, and discussed a main topic similar to those of CERES’. This is done so that the OC and volunteers have a prior knowledge about the issues that they will spread through our air campaign. Furthermore, in the second session of the pre-project training, we held a Focus Group Discussion where OC and volunteers could discuss about the problems faced by refugees in Indonesia.

The second series of CERES is an air campaign which lasts for 5 days and consists of several challenges such as Test Your Knowledge, BINGO, Find the Hidden Words, and Twibbon. Also written in the third paragraph, through CERES, the community can indirectly contribute on helping refugees using our BINGO challenge where for every BINGO that is obtained, Rp10,000,- will be donated to www.kitabisa.com/kitauntukpengungsi, a fundraising held by SCORP CIMSA to help refugees.

The last series of CERES was a webinar attended by approximately 163 people which was held on 18^th October 2020 with two speakers: Julio Castor Achmadi, Coordinator of Legal Empowerment from SUAKA and Nashaat Jihad, a dentist, co-founder of the Hope Learning Center, and a refugees representative. By inviting two speakers who have very different perspectives, one of which is a refugee himself, CERES managed to attract attention and trigger many questions from the webinar participants so that a discussion was formed even between the two speakers. In addition, the CERES webinar was also attended by a representative of the French refugee named Roger from Congo.