Meetup 3 was led by Marcella van der Loos, who as a high school teacher was very much able to keep everyone focused. In the line-up were no less than three speakers from two different initiatives.

Dreams are magical adventures, and in your dreams you can do anything. But you can also daydream about everything that was and everything that will be. That is the introduction of Marissa and Ebel Jan van Dijk. With their project Keep Dreaming they want to tell the world that every child should be able to dream. Especially when you don’t have a home and are on your way to a different life. By stitching together ‘Dream Blankets’ they want to let refugee children know that we see them. Teacher at (primary)school in the Netherlands receive the ‘Keep Dreaming’-package for free, using which they can start the conversation about refugee children. They talk about what it means to have to flee your country, and how these children are no different than the ones in the classroom. Based on these conversations the children create a blanket, which is shipped to Lesvos by Marissa and Ebel Jan.

Next up: photographer Tim Boxhoorn. When he was at a refugee camp in Calais together with his partner in crime Nils Florian Hijlkema, they came up with the idea for 1 out of 60 million. The goals is to give every individual refugee a face and write down their stories like they tell them. So that we stop seeing refugees as one big anonymous group or a number, but as individuals and people with their own background and stories. People like us, with as the only difference that they have gone through something which we cannot imagine. An inspiring project!