"Stories Like Ours" Awareness Campaign
Campaign Illustrations accompanying DISPLACEMENT story of RSN Employee
Partners:
Refugee Solidarity Network
Issue area:
Refugee Rights
SErvices:
Creative Strategy, Illustration
Sustainable Development goals:
Background:
Refugee Solidarity Network (RSN), a long-term partner of Ayouni, is an international NGO that partners with advocates and local stakeholders in refugee host countries outside of the U.S. to develop organizational capacity for serving refugees and asylum seekers, and advance legal frameworks that uphold human rights. Many of RSN’s own employees have a personal tie to the work they do, with many of their families having embarked on their own journey to build a better life.
Goal:
RSN partnered with Ayouni to produce an awareness campaign that’s goal was to humanize the experience of displaced people everywhere by telling their own stories as descendants of refugees and asylum seekers. “Stories Like Ours”, a 5 part written and illustrated series telling the story of RSN’s Sustainability and Donor Relations Manager, Amal, and her family over several generations as they were displaced again and again and found home eventually in the United States, was born.
Challenge:
While Amal and her family’s story is powerful on its own, RSN knew that illustrations was what her story needed to connect to the hearts of readers everywhere. Ayouni came in to bring each part of Amal’s story to life through dream-like visual representations of the important moments that shaped her family’s history. These illustrations, created digitally and exported for various channels, conceptually depict the family’s journey and includes hidden visuals with symbolic references. Can you find them?
Strategy:
Since the story for the Stories Like Ours campaign is such a personal one, we determined that the best illustration style to represent the story was one that resembled that of a hand painted story book. The story is written as Amal’s own recollection of her family’s story of displacement, so the illustrations all have a dream-like feel, framed in a white dream bubble, and bend the rules of reality (for example, the cover image for the campaign includes all five character – two of them being the same person at different ages, and all characters sitting around a table drinking tea at the same time). The story ends with Amal herself, in a university setting reflecting on the her family’s past.
Two recurring visuals were chosen to tie the stories together each carrying their own meaning: the key, which symbolizes the hope that one day they will return home, and oranges, which symbolizes their home town of Yafa, Palestine.
Product:
The project resulted in six total illustrations created in Adobe Photoshop (5 parts and a cover image), each exported in square and landscape orientation to be used across channels and purposes. The campaign was shared across social media channels, in RSN’s weekly email newsletter, and on their website here.
STORIES LIKE OURS
Part 1:
“Nestled in the easternmost part of the Mediterranean, historic Yafa was a port city known for its beloved, sweet oranges. Here, my grandfather lived as a happy child–comforted by the hospitality of home and the smell of the sea. When conflict escalated, my young grandfather and his family fled Palestine–traveling by foot to reach Jordan alongside other newly displaced Palestinians. “This will be temporary,” many thought–reassuring their children as they grasped tighter the keys of home weighing heavy in their pockets, yet heavier on their hearts. For my family, this would be the beginning of our story–a journey of despair, displacement, and determination to one day return home, generation after generation.”
Part 2:
“Though the landscape in Jordan resembled that of Palestine, home was never forgotten as displaced communities replicated family recipes, sang traditional folk songs, and shared stories of ‘baladna’ (our home), over and over. My grandfather’s family lived in Jordan for years—receiving citizenship through an amended nationality law in the 1950s. Yet, lack of educational and work opportunities–along with news of a booming oil industry in the Gulf—led my family to apply for residency visas in Kuwait. My grandfather lived in Kuwait from late childhood and all throughout his adult life. Unable to return to his birth city by the sea, Kuwait became his home. While he lived in Kuwait for decades, he was never treated equally. With no pathway to citizenship, neither he nor anyone in the family could buy a home, own a business, work certain professions, or access particular medical treatments and programs available only to Kuwaiti citizens. Fulfilling that longing for a place to call home, Kuwait held a special place in his heart—in 2014, he passed away there, leaving behind seven children, and 17 grandchildren.”
Part 3:
“In 1991, my father landed in NYC. The United States was different. Concrete pavements replaced the empty lots of sand where kids back home played past sundown. The skyscrapers couldn’t compare to his simple Kuwaiti neighborhood. Citing fear of persecution if he returned during the war, my father applied for Temporary Protected Status, a U.S. humanitarian assistance program that briefly included Kuwait in the early 90s. After a lengthy interview process, his application was granted; then, he picked up and left for Chicago. Taxi-driver, grill-cook, restaurant manager–he moved from one job to the next. Grateful for the opportunity, yet terribly missing home, my father would face his own internal war. The starry-eyed foreigner and the overworked migrant in isolation always seemed to exist in tandem. Eventually, he saved up enough money, became a U.S. citizen, and returned to Jordan post-war to marry my mother and start a family.”
Part 4:
“In 1991, my father landed in NYC. The United States was different. Concrete pavements replaced the empty lots of sand where kids back home played past sundown. The skyscrapers couldn’t compare to his simple Kuwaiti neighborhood. Citing fear of persecution if he returned during the war, my father applied for Temporary Protected Status, a U.S. humanitarian assistance program that briefly included Kuwait in the early 90s. After a lengthy interview process, his application was granted; then, he picked up and left for Chicago. Taxi-driver, grill-cook, restaurant manager–he moved from one job to the next. Grateful for the opportunity, yet terribly missing home, my father would face his own internal war. The starry-eyed foreigner and the overworked migrant in isolation always seemed to exist in tandem. Eventually, he saved up enough money, became a U.S. citizen, and returned to Jordan post-war to marry my mother and start a family.”
Part 5:
“I was born in Jordan in 1998 to an extensive family history of displacement and migration destined to shape the first 15 years of my life. After birth, to about age five, we attempted to permanently settle in South Florida. However, increased cost of living, and escalating violence against Muslims post-9/11 added a layer of doubt around staying. We decided to return to Kuwait where we still had family; there, I completed the majority of my schooling years. The constant need to pick up and leave played a major role in how I defined myself. For a while, my identity was blurred: Jordanian? Kuwaiti? Palestinian? Arab? Muslim? American? I never connected to just one, instead I shifted identities to adapt to my environment. We moved back to Florida where I finished up high school and college. At university, I met older Palestinian-Americans on campus who encouraged me to feel confident in my family story of displacement and migration. Welcomed and inspired–these college years left the greatest impact on me. I think about my grandfather and Palestine often, imagining how our lives would have been if we stayed home in Yafa. But I know Palestine is within me, within my father, and deeply rooted in my grandfather and ancestors. I will visit one day and eat an orange by the sea.”