HISTORY

RefugeeYouth was founded as a charity back in 2002. It grew out of the Barbara Melunsky Fund, which was set up in 1995 by friends of Barbara Melunsky after she passed away in order to continue her legacy of work with refugees. Barbara was a feisty activist who worked hard to support and promote refugee communities, especially in her role as Principal Grants Officer for the London Borough Grants Unit. 

Refugee community leaders had suggested using the fund to support the development of youth work in refugee communities, as this was an area they were struggling with. After partnering with the Evelyn Oldfield Unit and Westminster Diocese Refugee Services, young people became one of the fund’s main priorities and research on how to get youth initiatives off the ground in refugee communities was commissioned and published. This research, Out of Exile: developing youth work with young refugees (2000) was supported by a series of development days and brought together different refugee community organisations, mainstream youth services and youth policy-makers who made suggestions for supporting refugee youth work. These included initiatives to bring young refugees together and training programmes to develop workers’ experience and expertise. And out of this work emerged The Barbara Melunsky Refugee Youth Agency which we all refer now to as RefugeeYouth.

Since then and for the past 18+ years we have been growing and building our practice and offerings to young refugees and newly arrived migrants to the UK.