It’s all about social networks, again. But in this case we’re not talking about Facebook, it’s now time to speak about the less famous but equally important RefUnite.org, the website created by Danish brothers David and Christopher Mikkelsen, which has just received the $3.8 million grant from IKEA Foundation.
That’s right, if you thought that the 2.0 guru generation was all American , only wore flip flops and created their genius inventions in the dorms of extremely expensive ivy league universities, you’re being mistaken.
The Mikkelsen brothers started to develop their project in 2005, after meeting Mansour, a young Afghan refugee, who had lost contact with his family while escaping from Kabul and the Taliban regime. Although the two brothers helped him find one of his siblings, they realized that the existing family tracing programs were lacking in using collaborative technology and they soon understood that they needed to find a new way to help the hundreds of thousands of refugees who wanted to reconnect with relatives and friends. In 2006 they founded the non-profit organization Refugees United, while in 2008 they finally launched Refunite.org.
The website offers a free, easy and most important safe way to help refugees find their families. As a matter of fact the website is available in 20 languages and users can register anonymously and only use their initials, date of birth or other information and which can only be recognized by family and close friends.
Dozens of families have reconnected in the last few years thanks to this website and the Ikea Foundation grant will enable Refugees United to scale up its service and connect more and more refugees all over the world.
