‘I can tell the story of my own life’: The Greek magazine training refugees as journalists

Author: Nanna Vedel-Hertz

This article is part of Changing the Narrative. Articles in this series are written by student or early career journalists who took part in The Local’s training course on solutions-focused migration reporting. Find out more about the project here.

Athens-based media organisation Solomon runs a training scheme for migrants and refugees that aims to give them the tools to tell their own stories themselves.

Iliana Papangeli, the managing director of the magazine Solomon, is sitting in her home in Greece. The national lockdown means that she has to text the government for permission whenever she needs to leave her house: “I have to write 2 if I want to go to the supermarket and 6 if I am going outside to exercise. It is really kind of absurd.” Yet the situation has not stopped her and the rest of Solomon from working hard these past months and developing their next cycle of workshops.

Solomon was originally created in 2016 by Fanis Kollias, a Greek national and social entrepreneur. It was created as a response to the ongoing crisis over refugees, and the lack of representation. Kollias’s original aim was to create an online media platform where refugees themselves could write about the topics that were important to them and their lives.

 

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