Soup and Socks e.V.

 
10 Years Soup and Socks e.V.
Dear supporters,
Almost exactly 10 years ago, we founded our organisation Soup and Socks. Shortly afterwards, our first article about our first mission in Greece was published in the collection of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (‘In search of eye-level solidarity’) (page 79 in the PDF). The article began with the words: ‘We could have gone anywhere...’ – which was true. It was December 2015, the ‘year of migration’. Around one million people arrived in Europe in search of safety and freedom that year. It was the year Merkel said her famous phrase, ‘Wir schaffen das!’ (We can do it!).We could have gotten involved in many places, especially along the Balkan route back then – and decided on Athens for various reasons. For two weeks over the New Year 2015/2016, we prepared warm, delicious soups and distributed them to the many people who had been stranded on public squares during their journey.



This experience shaped us — and perhaps more than the people to whom we handed a meal back then. We realized: yes, we are a strong team. But we were also creating new dependencies instead of fostering structures that enable people to experience real self-determination and dignity.


This realization prompted some of us to turn our lives upside down. After setting up a community kitchen in the camp of Katsikas from March to May 2016, we went on to build Habibi.Works. So within just seven months, we had transformed our one-off emergency intervention into today’s long-term project in northwestern Greece.
Habibi.Works is a space where empowerment and self-determination are at the core. We opened the first makerspace in the humanitarian context in Europe — a project with 12 open workshops where people could develop practical solutions themselves and deepen their skills. It was, and still is, groundbreaking.


It wasn’t all easy though. For example, for the first 2.5 years, no one on the team received a salary for this full-time work (until we realized that the values we advocate for, such as solidarity, dignity, and fairness, also needed to be practiced within our own organization). The initial sense of momentum in society and the media attention shifted. Again another few years later, the pandemic brought an end to many small projects across Greece and was used by right-wing governments as a pretext to further restrict the rights of people seeking refuge. Also today, the political situation remains difficult. Solidarity is being criminalized. The Mediterranean continues to be the deadliest border in the world


Within the project itself, not everything was—nor is—always easy, either. We work every day with people who have lived through severe hardship, and we witness their grief, anger, and despair. We worry about the criminalization of our solidarity and about the financial future of the project. We take far too little time for a life outside this work, we face difficult decisions, we lose donors. We navigate conflicts. And in those moments, we sometimes ask ourselves, honestly, why we are doing all of this

Despite — or perhaps precisely because of — these challenges, we know this: For the past 10 years, the response to displacement and migration in Europe has been carried to a huge percentage by small, grassroots organisations. By organisations like Soup and Socks. Without us, and without you, none of this would be possible. (And in the unlikely event that Angela Merkel ever reads this newsletter, I would like to ask her and today’s politicians on behalf of all small projects across Europe: ‘Who has actually been making it work here for the past 10 years? Politics?”


The article mentioned above ended 10 years ago with the following words:
“It is the responsibility of European governments to establish structures that enable meaningful coordination of these challenges and ensure dignified support for people. We must demand that governments fulfill their humanitarian obligations. What we urgently need today—for this aim and in order to successfully live together in our societies—are people who act, in small ways, who create change, who shape their surroundings.”
What gives us hope today is the fact that with this project we make a very real difference every single day. Our actions have impact. What could be more encouraging in a complex, often hopeless-seeming world?
For 10 years, people from across Europe have chosen to stand up for the values our societies so urgently need—respect, dignity, solidarity—by working on the ground in Greece.For 10 years, people like you have chosen to support this project and thus be part of a solution.For 10 years, thousands of people have benefited from the existence of Soup and Socks.
These are no small things. When taking a step back to acknowledge everything we managed to achieve thanks to your support since 2015, we feel grateful and somewhat proud of this story.