Winners

The winners of the inaugural 2009 JRS Youth Award have been announced. Selected recently from a field of more than 100 entries comprising websites, paintings, songs, short films, slide shows, PowerPoint presentations, story books, colouring in books and pamphlets, the winning entries can be downloaded here.

Year 11/12 Category Winners: Sydney Grammar http://youth.jrs.org.au/entry-2/index.html

Runners-up: Roseville College (large file)  http://youth.jrs.org.au/entry-1/video.mpeg

Year 9/10 Category Winners: Genazzano FCJ College http://youth.jrs.org.au/entry-3/website.pdf

Runners-up: Loreto Kirribilli http://loretok10.glogster.com/refugees/

The winners of the award were selected recently from a field of more than 100 entries, comprising websites, paintings, songs, short films, slide shows, PowerPoint presentations, story books, colouring in books and pamphlets.

'More than 400 students got involved, and the quality and creativity of the entries was outstanding,' said the Director of JRS Australia, Fr Sacha Bermudez-Goldman SJ. 'We plan to use some of these works to help us raise even greater awareness of the issues affecting the lives of asylum seekers and refugees. We hope more schools will be able to participate next year!'

One of the judges was Vietnamese refugee and filmmaker, Khoa Do, who was named Young Australian of the Year in 2005. 'The products showed great depth of understanding of the refugee plight', he said.

Based on the JRS Pedro Arrupe Award held in Europe, the award aims to highlight the plight of refugees around the world as well as the work undertaken by JRS both in Australia and internationally. Students in Years 9 to 12 worked in small groups, exploring a diversity of refugee-related issues such as child soldiers, life in refugee camps, causes of forced displacement and ways of offering greater hospitality and welcome to refugees arriving in our country. JRS provided support for students, facilitating personal interaction with asylum seekers and refugees and supplying a range of other resources.

'Participating in JRS this year didn't teach me so much as it showed me', said Alice Gornall, of the Year 9 Genazzano FCJ College award winner group. 'It showed me the reality of the lives of other human beings, who, by chance, have not one eighth of the privileges that I have.'

Alice and her group developed a website project which 'expanded beyond the walls of the school, involving interviews with refugees, visits to medical centres, the Asylum Seekers Resource Centre and the refugee-run restaurant Lentil as Anything', said judge and JRS Project Assistant Cecilia Silva. 'They brought this wealth of information and shared it with the rest of the school, thus promoting awareness amongst their peers on refugee issues. They did this by writing articles of their accounts in the school's newsletter and organising activities to raise funds to reunite a refugee with her family.'