Embrace: The Right To Belong

Around the world the number of people forcibly displaced from their homelands is 84 million and counting . When refugees arrive in Australia, they are often placed in ethnically diverse and lower socio-economic communities. The Les Twentyman Foundation (LTF), located in Melbourne’s inner west, is one such community. As a result of the refugee’s language issues and past trauma, the young refugees often fail to integrate into their new culture. This leads them to join gangs, get into drugs and violent crime, just to feel a sense of belonging. Les Twentyman and his team work directly with these young refugees and at-risk youth through inspiring skills-based programs. The aim of this film is to show both the macro and micro of this global refugee crisis, both through them working directly with youth in the USA, NZ and Europe, and also through the life experience/empathetic eyes of this unique team.

We aim to inspire the international audience to directly engage at their own local community level with at-risk youth and refugees. It’s via one-on-one engagement through volunteering or supporting programs such as LTF, that we create truly resilient and inclusive communities. We will foster a sense of belonging to community and show that it is also about us evolving our society and learning to welcome the courage and infusion of new perspective that comes with embracing diverse youth.

A disconnected society has a profound and measurable impact on our local communities and the wellbeing of all its members. This film will inspire people to engage with their local youth organizations directly. Secondly, we will raise awareness of the broader international issue of refugees and the crisis of their massive worldwide displacement, through working with our charitable partners across the globe. We will find working solutions through these partners and promote them to our international audience via our website for the documentary. Our audience will then be encouraged to either volunteer for a charity within their area of interest or raise money/fiscally support that charity or many. We hope to inspire our international audience to take direct action, investigate their own local charities, so that they become involved and work towards an inclusive and resilient community.

We have currently partnered with LTF and may find other relevant charities we wish to align with through the course of production. While LTF already has its own charitable status, in order for us to maintain journalistic integrity and separation from the subject, we’ve applied for fiscal sponsorship with Documentary Australia. LTF has also given us full access to Les and his team for the purpose of story development. We will also utilize LTF’s hands-on knowledge of at-risk youth and refugees, to help us develop a targeted social impact campaign that will truly provide real, tangible and quantifiable outcomes.

We hope to inspire our international audience to take direct action, investigate their own local charities and community groups so that they become involved and work towards an inclusive and resilient community.