The project
SolidariTIR is an important project involving food and hygiene distributions on a daily basis. This project was born in September 2020 with the will to plan the humanitarian aid needed to face the sanitary, socio-political and climatic emergency affecting Greece, which leads to a constant and progressive worsening of the situation with thousands of people lacking access and/or the resources to access food.
Food and basic necessities are mainly distributed to the residents of the refugee camp in Corinth, the city where several of our educational projects are based, and in Athens, where the close network of cooperation with other organisations enables many people to survive. In this project, from the very beginning we decided not to limit the distribution but to allow people, through a specially created point system, to be able to choose what to take, according to their needs, priorities and tastes.
Context
Almost 150,000 people are refugees in Greece and half of them come from Afghanistan and Syria (source: UNHCR). These are territories that we encounter on a daily basis and are known to all for the atrocities and pain that recent wars and events have caused. Those countries are areas from which people have been fleeing for years for an ever-increasing number of reasons, and from which they put their lives at risk in order to move towards the countries of the European Union where they ask for protection, where they hope to find a future.
This hope is very often extinguished when they arrive in the Greece of the refugee camps and hotspot islands where the EU turns a blind eye to respect for human rights and access to basic services such as food security. In Greece, our partnership with One Bridge To Idomeni and Vasilika Moon has since January distributed food to more than 1,000 vulnerable families, mostly children, living in Athens and Corinth. These people come from different countries: Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Senegal, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Somalia, Cameroon, Iraq, Pakistan and from Greece itself. These families cannot afford their basic needs, such as food, and we try to support them with the ’SolidariTIR’ project. Many of them have been cut off from all kinds of subsidies provided by the Greek state. On the one hand, asylum applications are systematically rejected and applicants lose all economic support, so they are forced to leave the camps and no longer have access to food. On the other, those who are recognised as refugees are unable to buy basic necessities if they cannot find work. More than 5,000 people are still in need of food in Greece’s capital, a number which, according to estimates, could increase further in the upcoming months.
Goal: food security
Unfortunately, even today in Greece, Europe is still facing food insecurity, the uncertainty of the right of every human being to have access to a plate of food every day. The SolidariTir project supports children, women and men, vulnerable people and the elderly, who have recently arrived in Greece or who have lived here for years, but whose health is now in question. We must continue to support as many people as possible, regardless of their legal status. Food security is the basis of human needs. No one should experience food insecurity.
