Refugees
"When the communication happens, the anxiety goes down…"
-Ann Whitfield Carter
Ms. Carter spend time volunteering at a refugee camp in Eastern Europe and she shared with us her experience. We used it to guide our work.
Task
Develop a lens that helps people understand and empathize with refugees across the world in order to create positive change.
Situation
Refugee camps have a hard time communicating with refugees, which induces anxiety. On top of that, the plight of refugees in communicated in a negative way to the public.
Challenge: Spread accurate information without the influence of personal beliefs with the goal of decreasing tension and anxiety between refugees, refugee camps, and the world.
Problem
The overall challenge is broken down into three layers:
Solution
We want to solve for all three layers of the problem as follows:
According to International Refugee Law, Refugees are supposed to be treated like regular immigrants or even national citizens in all cases.
Strategy: Make refugees feel like neighbors, not enemies
To solve these problems, we want to work with the company whose mission statement is: "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
Introducing Google Neighbors, a philanthropic extension of Google focused on disseminating accurate and non-bias information to both refugees and citizens of countries who are receiving refugees.
Informational Video:
Becoming a refugee is a necessity, driven by fear. Many travel thousands of miles risking their lives for the possibility of a better future. Their fear is exacerbated by registration efforts that routinely occur at all refugee camps. Most refugees fear that the information gathered by the camps is used and sent back to the country they're fleeing from. The purpose of our informational video is intended educate the refugees on the registration process prior to their arrival to the camps. The language is meant to be simple and easily translatable with Google Translate.
Visual Language:
A major pain point within the refugee camps if the inability to communicate due to language barriers. Creating a basic visual language will ease the tension in directing people to the appropriate location.
Refugee Rights:
As we try to make the camp a less stressful environment we also have the opportunity to further educate workers/ volunteers, and refugees via our Google Neighbors application programmed on tablets, located in the community center. It will also have the functionality to record personal stories aggregated by Google and uploaded to the Google Neighbors micro-site.
Micro-site:
World Refugee Day
We want Google Neighbors to take over the Google Logo on the Search page on World Refugee Day, which is June 20.