World needs new way of helping refugees

Tom Cochrane turns his phone around to give a glimpse of where he’s sitting — the middle of Lebanon’s farming heartland that’s now home to settlements of tens of thousands of Syrian refugees.

A Syrian mother and her sons smile and wave from a group of shacks and tarps. They’re among the ones who will be part of the upwards of 30,000 Syrians settled in Canada by the end of this year.

When Cochrane visited them last week, someone had been playing his classic song “Life is a Highway.”

It was a moment of connection during a visit that impressed upon the Canadian musician the importance of the West making enduring connections to all refugees, not just the ones who may settle in Canada or elsewhere one day.

After all, most just want to go home, he said. “If there is going to be peace in our world, it’s got to start with the kids and they have to know that the West cares and they have to know that we care,” he said.

About half of those affected by the Syrian crisis are children; World Vision and others help fund education programs but the money is running out, putting the programs at risk.

Cochrane was in Lebanon to help draw attention to the issue; he’s been working alongside World Vision for years, one of many celebrities who’ve long lent their star power to promoting humanitarian causes.

An estimated 60 million people are now displaced by conflict and climate change, the highest number since the Second World War.

World Refugee Day on Monday provided an opportunity for one organization to try something new.

Months ago, the Humanitarian Coalition, representing five agencies, began reaching out to others to create a fundraising campaign using June 20 as an artificial deadline to attach some urgency to the need for people to help, taking a page from matching campaigns used by the federal government recently.

The cross-agency effort united behind a single website, worldrefugeeday.com, and then went on to get support from the private sector, everyone from media companies who agreed to run ads to PayPal, which agreed to waive its fees for every gift to the campaign. The Canadian Teachers’ Federation is promoting the campaign among its members.

“The old ways of doing things are inadequate. We need to do more and we need to differently,” said Nicolas Moyer, the executive director of the Humanitarian Coalition.