SolidariTee Annual Report 2025

We are delighted to share our annual report for the 2024-25 academic and financial year!

Read the Report

Despite a contextually very challenging year, our volunteer community, and the partners we support, were able to achieve successes that demonstrate the power of collective action and solidarity across all the pillars of our strategy:

• provision of trauma-informed legal aid

• outreach, education and convening

• platforming young activists

• resilient & sustainable ways of working

In addition, we reached an important milestone during the year, and were delighted to share that we have provided more than £600,000 in funding to support grassroots organisations delivering essential services for refugees and asylum seekers since we were first set up as a charity in 2019.

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Our work

In this report, you can read about the events, campaigns, and awareness-raising initiatives that our student volunteer community made possible throughout the year. All of these activities help to make a reality of our mission to unite students and young people in support of refugees and migrants, and equip them with accurate knowledge and understanding of the realities of seeking safety from persecution that will help to combat misinformation, hate and intolerance in our communities.

You can also read about the achievements of our partner organisations in Greece, who, using SolidariTee funding, are able to reach thousands of people each year who have endured persecution, torture, and other human rights abuses.

Our partners' clients include young people who have been wrongly detained for no crime other than seeking safety, mothers living in urban areas or abandoned buildings who have been failed by national and international protection mechanisms, and people who have been forced to live in refugee camp settings that fundamentally deny people the ability to meet their basic needs.

Thank you! I am very grateful to the lawyer. She saved my life and my child’s future. I will never forget what you did for me and all the other women.”

~ Client from Somalia, supported by our partner Irida Women's Centre's legal team for her asylum application and interview, and her child custody case

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The global context

This academic year was bookended by racist riots across the UK, fuelled by narratives which scapegoat refugees and other people who cross borders in search of peace, safety and freedom. It also took place against the backdrop of so many humanitarian crises, too often manufactured by violent oppressive agendas driven by global political leaders, where political will amongst the international community to put an end to attacks and rights violations has been lacking.

Unfortunately, at the time of publishing this report, too many of the crisis that were so devastating within the 24/25 academic year are ongoing, or worsened. The genocide in Palestine, live-streamed on our screens, has entered its third year, as has the war in Sudan, receiving little media attention but widely recognised to be the world's largest humanitarian and displacement crisis. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan continues to persecute and attempt to erase women, and many other marginalised groups, from society altogether.

It is no surprise therefore, that our partners supported people throughout the year across all of these nationalities, alongside many more. At the same time, despite these crises continuing to unfold, media and political narratives continue to present people seeking safety as 'bogus' or 'manipulating the system'.

Policies responding to refugees in the UK and Greece became more hostile throughout this period. By the time the academic year had ended, in August, the UK Government had rolled out its 'one-in-one-out' policy, enabling them to forcibly return people who had crossed the Channel to France if they deemed their claim for international protection 'inadmissible'.

A month later, Greece passed shocking legislation which introduced harsher prison terms for people whose claim for refugee status was rejected, effectively punishing people for applying for asylum within an ineffective system. Wrongful rejections, in so many cases as a result of a lack of legal aid or mental healthcare, are common, making this approach even more cruel and irresponsible.

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The need for young people, who have grown up with more than a decade of increasingly hostile political responses to the so-called 'refugee crisis in Europe', to come together in support of peace and safety for all is more important now than ever. So is the need to fund legal and mental health support for people seeking safety at Europe's borders, caught within a system where the state provides none of this.

We will continue to unite our community in solidarity with refugees in the period to come, and we welcome all those who support us to get involved. Whether by reading the full report, attending an event, volunteering or making a donation, the impact of each and every action is multiplied when part of a collective movement.

If you have any questions about this report, or would like to get involved further, please email alexa@solidaritee.org.uk. Thank you for taking the time to learn more about our work.