Happy New Year! It’s 2020 and RefugePoint is 15 years old. Refugees represent, perhaps, the world’s greatest untapped resource. They are engineers, social workers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and farmers – the whole range of people with skills and abilities, and they are ready to contribute. 

And RefugePoint today is in an exciting place where we can further the contributions that refugees themselves can make. Last month I was in Geneva, at the Global Refugee Forum, which is the most significant meeting and convening around refugee issues that has taken place in the past 50 years, where refugees themselves, and heads of state, and many other leaders came together to discuss new solutions for refugees. 
RefugePoint is spearheading and helping to build some of these new solutions for refugees. 

Today, the Canadian government has asked us to help build a labor mobility pilot project to connect refugees with job opportunities in Canada. Today, we are working closely with the UN Refugee Agency to build a new family reunion pilot project to identify and protect refugee unaccompanied children in life-threatening situations and reunite them with parents or other surviving family members in European countries. And today, RefugePoint is building self-reliance opportunities for refugees so that they can support themselves, contribute to their host communities, and show what they can provide to the world.

These opportunities are immense, they are unprecedented, and it matches the unprecedented need in the world. Thank you for being with us on this journey.