The international links between PeaceJammers resulted in an award-winning Billion Acts of Peace project that has helped hundreds of unaccompanied child refugees in northern Greece. 

The students of PeaceJam Greece, based in Thessaloniki, and the PeaceJammers from the Mount School and other schools in York, worked together to gather backpacks, fill them with essentials, ship them to Greece, and distribute them to vulnerable children in the refugee camps.

Find out more about the LifeBag project in this video, above, and the BBC Look North report, below.

The LifeBag project was started by PeaceJam Greece but schools from the US, Netherlands, Belgium and the UK soon got involved and our York-based PeaceJammers went to Greece to personally deliver lifeboats to children there.

One York-based PeaceJammer, Annabelle Hill, 18, from the Mount School, said: “It got to the point where the global refugee crisis was just being talked about in numbers and it lacked humanity. I tried to imagine myself in that situation, which pushed me, even more, to participate in the project, which was a really simple way of getting involved and helping. 

“The opportunity to visit PeaceJam Greece and personally deliver the lifebags, also further contextualised the issue. Meeting the people that I was helping made me realise that although they were from a different country and have a different culture, we are all the same, and part of one global community.”