OM Beirut Charity Facing challenges

Victoria Lupton (SU 2003-05) founded an arts and education organisation in Beirut in 2015 called Seenaryo.

Victoria recently contacted us to tell us more about their work and the difficulties they are currently facing.

“As you might imagine it hasn’t been an easy summer. We have been launching 15 arts projects providing a creative outlet for over 200 children affected by the Beirut explosion to process what they’ve been through and begin to imagine a better, safer future. Attached is a photo I took last week of one of our performances – all of the children’s homes (as well as my home and office) were badly damaged in the explosion.

As with so many charities, it has more generally been an impossible year for us. Fortunately, we’ve been able to quickly innovate and transform the way we work and the projects we implement: we’ve become experts in distance learning in Lebanon and Jordan, training teachers to deliver education to many thousands of refugee children remotely via WhatsApp and our teacher training app. But of course, with the economic collapse, currency crisis, Covid and now the explosion in Lebanon, the need for our services has ballooned, and our ability to fundraise to deliver these services is much-compromised.

Given all this, we launched our first-ever online Crowdfunder a few weeks ago.”

The fundraiser is already doing really well, having already raised £46,503. It ends on Tuesday 29th September.

You can read more about Victoria and Seenaryo in the 2018 issue of the OM Magazine on page 44.