Safe Passage Young Leaders: Education for Social Change in the Virtual World
Safe Passage International helps refugees access safe and legal routes to sanctuary. Through a combination of campaigning,
advocacy and legal casework, they influence policy and work directly with young people and families to help them reunite with
loved ones and reach sanctuary. Youth Advocacy and Campaigns Organiser Ruth Holtom works with an inspirational group of young people from refugee and asylum-seeking backgrounds – Safe Passage Young Leaders - who speak out about issues that affect them and others like them and campaign for a more welcoming, just and equal world. She shares her experience of virtual engagement with the group.
Every Tuesday morning, I open my laptop and send round a Zoom link to the young people I have the privilege of working with, reminding them that we will be meeting that evening. Then, just before our evening session, I log on to Zoom and get ready to welcome them into our virtual space. Their names pop up in the waiting room, and we all gather on the screen, our faces lit up by the glow of our phones or computer screens.
Compared to preparing for face-to-face workshops, running these weekly Zoom sessions might seem simple and stress-free. Instead of filling my bags with flipchart paper, risk assessments and petty cash, I simply log on to Zoom, share my screen and create some breakout rooms. But as anyone currently facilitating online learning knows, youth engagement in this new virtual world brings a whole host of new challenges.
After hours of algebra and English on computer screens, often struggling to connect to unreliable WiFi, it can be tiring and draining for the young people we work with to participate in additional sessions in the evenings. It is a challenge to ensure that everyone can join our sessions, when there is such disparity in digital access, homelife and English language levels. However, I have been constantly astounded by the Young Leaders’ energy and commitment to bringing about the change they want to see in the world, even when they are unable to meet face to face.
Safe Passage Young Leaders
These inspiring young people from refugee and asylum-seeking backgrounds meet weekly online to make friends, learn new skills, and work together to make change and challenge injustice. The young people I get to work with are experts by experience on refugee policy and they care passionately about creating safe and legal routes to safety for people like them. Since the pandemic began, the Safe Passage Young Leaders have achieved an incredible amount from the confines of their own homes. In the past nine months, they have:
Produced a video calling on politicians to protect family reunion for refugees.
- Written and delivered a letter to members of the House of Lords urging them to vote to protect family reunion in the Immigration Bill.
- Met influential MPs and peers online and shared their views and opinions on issues relating to asylum and immigration.
- Got involved with Safe Passage as an organisation, shared their ideas and expertise, and helped us to recruit new members of staff.
- Collaborated with other groups of young refugee campaigners, such as Hummingbird Young Leaders and Kent Refugee Action Network Youth Forum, creating connections across geographical divides and building strong networks of solidarity and support.
In this new year of 2021, the Young Leaders have a lot to speak out about. Now that the UK has left the EU, and with it the Dublin
Regulation family reunion scheme, refugees must apply for family reunification through domestic immigration rules, which are much more restrictive. Furthermore, various other resettlement schemes for refugees are still on pause due to the pandemic, and the government has recently announced that it will not be continuing resettlement for child refugees from Europe.
Campaigning with Safe Passage, the Young Leaders are hoping to influence policy on these issues in an upcoming government review on safe and legal routes. Over the past year they have proven to be brave and unflinching in their words and actions, and I have no doubt that these young people will stop at nothing to hold the Government to account.
If you have any questions about Safe Passage’s campaigns or the Young Leaders group, contact Ruth at ruth@safepassage. org.uk. If you know a young person who would be interested in joining the Young Leaders, you can find out more on our website.
Article from Engage issue 22.
BY RUTH HOLTOM • June 18, 2021
How a simple act of practical solidarity is transforming the journey to school in The Gambia’s Central River Region North Policies have been written. Schools have been built. Yet for many children in The Gambia’s Central River Region North, access to education is still measured in kilometres, not opportunity.
‘In a single hour vast tracts of shaded woodland became a jumble of torn trees and upturned soil, exposed to the glare of the summer sun. Such land-clearing events are rare, but forests exhibit remarkable resilience in the face of disaster. I’m told that the Chinese character for ‘catastrophe’ is the same as that which represents the word ‘opportunity’. And, the blowdown, while catastrophic, presented opportunities for many species.’ (Wall Kimmerer, 2003: 89). In the context of a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world (Stein, 2021) what kinds of education for hope might support children’s and young people’s critical engagement in local and global issues? In the spirit of exploring the possibilities of hope further, this short article focuses on the area of global citizenship and sustainabilityrelated education. It will briefly open by sharing commonalities across pedagogical approaches that take up the concept and act of hope more critically, and close by offering reflective questions for educators, with suggestions for further reading. Perhaps it is a kind of hope that is grounded in the present, in future reimagining(s), in ethical solidarity, and an acknowledgement of our deep entanglement with the living metabolism of planet earth 1 our singular home (UNESCO, 2021); a hope that engages with complex root causes and lived realities of multiple overlapping crises in critically reflexive and contextually relevant ways. As McCloskey notes, ‘Hope can fire our collective imagination and critical consciousness as a mainspring to activism and intervention in the world.’ (2025: 3). Commonalities across critical pedagogical approaches to hope include: Acknowledging the context of a ‘seamless single story of progress, development and human evolution’ (Andreotti, V.D.O., 2021b Relating to social and ecological justice and the wellbeing of people and planet Using participatory, action-orientated and inquiry-based learning processes Exploring diverse worldviews and perspectives Practising grounding in the present with opening up possibilities for change (relational, embodied, response-able 2 ) Experiencing ‘struggle’ in different forms (dialogical, selfreflexive, open-ended) Engaging individual and collective agency, action and activism Looking for lifelong and life-wide learning and unlearning. 1 See ‘Co-sensing with Radical Tenderness’, in Machado de Oliveira Andreotti. 2021a 2 See ‘Crossing Borders’ in 2 Depth Education “Depth Education and the Possibility of GCE Otherwise, 2021b. Source: Andreotti, V. 2021a & 2021b., Atif, A. (2025)., Bourn, D. 2021., Bryan. A. and Mochizuki,Y., 2024., Giroux, H.A. 2025., Meade, E. 2025. Whilst engaging in the concept and act of hope more critically reflect upon: What kinds of education for hope might you explore further and why? How might you provide generative spaces for engaging in diverse worldviews and perspectives? In what ways can you facilitate individual and collective agency? How might you support learners’ practice grounding in the present in order to relate differently? In what ways can you support learners in navigating complex root causes and lived realities of local and global issues? As Chief Ninawa Hini Kui affirms, ‘The future depends much less on the images we project ahead than on our capacity to repair relations and build relationships differently in the present.’ (Andreotti et al, 2023: 73. An invitation for further reading: Transformative Learning for a Sustainable Future . d’Abreu, C., Belgeonne, C., Bourn, D. and Hatley, J. (2025) ‘Transformative Learning for a Sustainable Future’. DERC Research Paper 24. London: UCL Institute of Education. Hospicing Modernity: facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism. Machado de Oliveira Andreotti, V. (2021a) ‘Hospicing Modernity: facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism’ , London: Penguin Random House. Development Education and Hope . McCloskey, S. (2025). (ed) ‘Development Education and Hope’. ‘Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review’ , Vol. 41, Autumn. Centre for Global Education, Belfast. Link to and download the full reference list here
This summed up to me about why I volunteer for the Hands Up Project. HUP is a charity trust which, through its network of volunteers, connects children around the world with young people in Palestine. By means of online interaction, drama and storytelling activities, it enables the use of creativity and selfexpression to promote mutual understanding, personal growth, and the development of English language skills. I joined HUP in 2020 during COVID. After going to Palestine in 2017, I wanted to get more involved in working with Palestinian children in schools. HUP gave me the opportunity to link up with schools in the West Bank and Gaza. Every week I’d tell them stories from all over the world, then we’d discuss it, play games and I’d get them to retell it. Sometimes we would work from their coursebook English for Palestine’ in mutual team teaching sessions with their teacher. The simple act of telling a story became much more than entertainment. It became connection, healing, and a bridge to the world beyond their immediate reality to help them improve their language skills, and to give them a platform to speak about their lives in a language that connects them to people everywhere. I loved it, every week, seeing their smiling faces on the screen and building long lasting friendships with their teachers. I even went to Gaza in 2023 and met some of the kids I’d only seen on Zoom. It was a beautiful experience and something I will never forget. As hostilities escalated, I lost contact with everyone. I thought about where the kids were and what had happened to them. As I watched schools being bombed, universities flattened, and people killed in their thousands, I thought about where the kids I’d met were and what was happening to them. I kept in contact with many of the teachers I knew and heard daily news of displacement, destruction, hunger and bombing. Recently, I’ve started to link up again with children in Gaza, and it feels wonderful to be back helping them learn after being denied an education for over two years. Connecting with children in Palestine is more than just words. When a child in Palestine confidently tells their story to someone on the other side of the world, bridges are built, empathy grows, and the world gains a fuller picture of childhood in contexts far from peace and privilege. My work with these children is rooted in the belief that education and voice are inseparable. Through storytelling and English language learning, I witness children not just learning new vocabulary, but reclaiming their narratives, believing in their potential, and finding human connection in a world they perceive has abandoned them. And more than anything, this work reminds us all that children — everywhere — deserve to learn, to speak, and to be heard. Links to HUP information, books and resources: The Hands Up Project BY SUSAN PIPER Susan Piper is currently an ESOL teacher in Oldham, Greater Manchester and has worked in education for over 30 years. She is also a volunteer for the Hands Up Project and is the International Solidarity Officer and President of her NEU district. She believes in quality education for all and aims to make her lessons creative and inclusive so that effective language learning can take place.
