175: Campaigning Voices for Refugees with Edie Lush

Change Makers: Leadership, Good Business, Ideas and Innovation

How do we support refugees to thrive in their second home? That’s the question we’re answering in a special edition of Change Makers, hosted by the fantastic journalist and broadcaster Edie Lush.

For the first in a new series of the podcast exploring some of the most pressing issues of our time, Edie speaks with three campaigning voices for refugees about why it matters to ensure that we support refugees with human-centred policy and ensure that they can play an important role in the UK’s social and economic story.

Amos Schonfield is the founder and CEO of Our Second Home – a charity that Seven Hills has been supporting for the past 18 months. It is a youth movement aimed at empowering refugees and asylum seekers to flourish here in the UK and build the next generation of leaders. Amos shares the family history that makes this cause personal to him and what he believes we can all do to help reshape the narrative around refugees.

Taban Shoresh OBE is founder of The Lotus Flower and a refugee who escaped the Kurdish genocide as a child. Today, she supports survivors of conflict and displacement through projects focused on education skills training, peacebuilding initiatives for women and income-generating projects. A former Change Makers guest, she returns to share her story of coming to the UK and why she believes it’s more important than ever for us to be welcoming to refugees.

Lord Alf Dubs is a Peer in the House of Lords and a long-time refugee campaigner, who came to the UK on the Kindertransport from Czechoslovakia, following the Nazi invasion of his birth country in 1938. Having first appeared on Change Makers in 2021, he joins us again to reflect on how Britain has changed in terms of its attitudes over the past 75 years and why he continues to make the case for refugees even at the age of 91.

We hope you enjoy this episode and something different to our usual offering. We’ll be exploring further vital issues alongside Edie in the new year, so look out for much more.

Seven Hills has been fundraising for Our Second Home since 2023, raising more than £2000. Help us to reach our target to support the next cohort of refugee leaders by donating here: https://www.justgiving.com/page/sevenhills-oursecondhome