Refugees writing change: Help launch The Archipelago online magazine

This post has been shared at the request of Kieren Kresevic Salazar, founder of The Archipelago online magazine.

We’re deeply committed to our writing… We’re in it for the long haul through thick and thin.

With COVID-19, we’re distancing from loved ones while our work and communities have been deeply disrupted.

For refugees, this isolation and uncertainty about the future has been their daily reality for years. Now COVID-19 compounded with pre-existing refugee mental health and homelessness crises mean there’s never been a more urgent time to support refugee voices and self-determination.

With your help, we’re creating The Archipelago online magazine to catalyse, share and grow refugees’ creative work.

Our online mag will feature fiction, memoir, poetry, journalism, photography, and visual art. The magazine will be entirely free and not-for-profit. Our name, archipelago, means re-imagining our world as a collection of islands in relationship to each other, rather than isolated nations and continents.

“Being writers gives us hope to live again while we are stuck as refugees in limbo. We are a forgotten group but writing helps us heal our life traumas and hold onto our dreams. We are trying to stand up for ourselves. Stand with us.” Warsan Weedhsame, Somali writer.

We’re enabling refugees in limbo to build creative careers and advocate for their own communities. In Indonesia, refugees are stuck in limbo for nearly a decade, unable to work or study, and cut off from resettlement because of border policies in Australia and the United States.

Over the past 6 months, we’ve formed a writers group made up of refugees from Somalia, Sudan, Eritrea, Myanmar, Pakistan and Afghanistan, collaborating with Australian and Indonesian writers.

How you can help

We can’t do it without your support. Together with you, we want to change the conversation around refugees and migration. Writing and art go beyond borders and the lack of rights, allowing refugees to speak directly to their audience and shape global conversations.

“Let us show you our world through our eyes. Our reality, our overflow, our struggle. Support us and bring us closer to the world.” Najma Rosa Ased, Eritrean writer.

To donate, click here.

Any amount you can help with will be incredibly appreciated by our writers and artists and push us over the line to get our magazine launched!

Sharing this fundraiser through Facebook, Twitter, email and texts with friends and family will go a huge way to helping us reach our goal. Each share makes a real difference!

How the funds will be used

$12,000 will fund the start-up of The Archipelago online mag and its operating costs for the first 3 months.

With your support, we will compensate every refugee writer and artist published, hire refugee web developers to build and maintain the site, and fund public transport and printing for 3 months of weekly workshops for over 30 writers and editors who are refugees in Indonesia. Refugees don’t have any work rights, so we give writers a small fee that is just enough to cover the expense of public transport to and from meetings.

100% of funds go to cover these expenses for the refugee community in Indonesia. Everyone in our team participates on an entirely voluntary unpaid basis and any non-refugee volunteers cover all of their expenses themselves.

Our progress so far

We’re a group of 30 emerging writers who formed our writers collective in October 2019. We’ve been hustling for the last 6 months to develop our skills and search for connections with other communities. Forty-five percent of our group are women, and we’re working hard to overcome structural barriers for women from communities where education and resources have mostly been privileged towards men. We’re deeply committed to our writing and to building The Archipelago, we’re in it for the long haul through thick and thin.

So far, our journalism writers have been published in prominent newspapers like Buzzfeed, Al Jazeera and SBS. A lot more creative writing is on its way.

Check out some of our articles:

About the organiser

Kieren Kresevic Salazar has been collaborating with refugee writers and artists in Indonesia since 2018, and has been running pro bono writing workshops in West Java for the last 6 months. He’s the former Editor in Chief of the Harvard Human Rights Review and Co-Director of the Harvard Human Rights Working Group.

Stay in touch with us

Whether or not you’re able to donate today, we’d love you to join us on our journey and sign up for updates here: https://www.thearchipelago.org/

And if you want to talk more, you can email us at thearchipelagomag@gmail.com

Refugee Research Online

Refugees writing change: Help launch The Archipelago online magazine