In support of UNICEF, NY in-person get together and on-line art auction featuring work by ‘The Simpsons’ creator Matt Groening, ‘Ben Ten’ co-creator Dave Johnson, and others will raise funds for Rohingya Muslim children living in the world’s largest refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.
Kids Entertainment Professionals for Young Refugees (KEPYR), the award-winning children's media charity, kicked off its 8th annual “Kindred Spirits” campaign on June 1. This year’s campaign will aid the over half million Rohingya Muslim children living in the world’s largest refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.
KEPYR notes that over a million Rohingya have been driven from their homes in Myanmar since 2017, fleeing a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing carried out by that country’s rogue military regime. The United Nations has called the Rohingya “the most persecuted minority in the world.”
Donations to UNICEF USA’s critical aid work in Cox’s Bazar, as well as an exclusive eBay auction featuring art from top talent, can be made on the KEPYR website. This year’s artists include award-winning cartoonist, writer, and creator Matt Groening (The Simpsons; Futurama, Disenchantment, Life in Hell); Ben Ten co-creator and Eisner nominated comics cover artist Dave Johnson; fellow comics Dan Brereton (X-Men, Justice League, Nocturnals); Martin Baynton, British author and illustrator of classic children's book and the animated series Jane and the Dragon; and Sean McManus, known for his work on Sandman, Swamp Thing, and DC Comics’ Fables.
New York supporters will gather on June 24 at 6:00 pm at The Ainsworth Midtown for a mixer and passive fundraiser. There is no charge for admission or donation required to attend. The venue is donating 20% of the night’s bar tab to the campaign.
“To the extent they are on people’s radars at all, the Rohingya are at best on the periphery of our consciousness here in the West,” said KEPYR head Grant Moran. “They’re geographically distant from us, their plight has been dragging on since 2017, and right now other urgent displacement crises, in Gaza and Sudan in particular, are understandably commanding the headlines. So, there is a real danger of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ with the Rohingya. It’s at the heart of KEPYR’s mission to shine light on children who can far too easily be forgotten and to provide our entertainment community with a simple way to put into positive action Fred Rogers’ reminder that ‘We are intimately related. May we never even pretend that we are not.’ For us in kids’ media that means all children are our business.”
Additional information about KEPYR and Kindred Spirits 2024 is available here.
Source: KEPYR
Debbie Diamond Sarto is news editor at Animation World Network.
