Refugee Week Berlin 2025

Welcome to Refugee Week Berlin!

The theme of this year’s Refugee Week is:

Community as a Superpower

Community is the incredible everyday. Ordinary and extraordinary. Simple acts of shared generosity. Kindness multiplied to become an unstoppable force!

“We can begin the process of making community wherever we are. We can begin by sharing a smile, a warm greeting, a bit of conversation; by doing a kind deed or by acknowledging kindness offered to us.”- bell hooks

Communities can bring people together. They can bridge divides and offer support. They can be spaces of resilience and places for healing. 

During the Refugee Week everyone is invited to spend time with friends and build new connections in and beyond our neighbourhoods. From communal meals and open air film screenings, to football matches and music making, let’s share the feelings of welcome and belonging. Listening, learning, laughing together.  

It is powerful what we can do when we move together towards a shared goal. So let’s redefine and rediscover our collective power to shape hopeful futures and begin by practising, celebrating and rehearsing it every day.

Join us for Refugee Week, 16–22 June 2025, and together let’s unleash the superpower of community!

Refugee Week is a world-wide festival celebrating the contributions, creativity and resilience of refugees and people seeking sanctuary. Held every year around World Refugee Day on the 20 June, Refugee Week is a growing global movement.

Through a programme of arts, cultural, sports and educational events alongside media and creative campaigns, Refugee Week enables people from different backgrounds to connect beyond labels, as well as encouraging understanding of why people are displaced, and the challenges they face when seeking safety.  Refugee Week is a platform for people who have sought safety in different places to share their experiences, perspectives and creative work on their own terms.

Refugee Week’s vision is for refugees and asylum seekers to be able to live safely within inclusive and resilient communities, where they can continue to make a valuable contribution.

Refugee Week is an umbrella festival, and anyone can get involved by holding or joining an event or activity. Refugee Week events happen in all kinds of different spaces and range from arts festivals, exhibitions, film screenings and museum tours to football tournaments, public talks and activities in schools. This week’s programme is the fourth Refugee Week in Berlin, curated by Dr Natasha Davis in collaboration with Mensch Raum Land. Most events are free of charge.

This and previous years’ partners are listed with each project and all their their logos are in the banner below, since the first Refugee Week Berlin in 2022.

Core Beliefs

Celebrating Contributions

Refugee Week celebrates the contributions of refugees and people seeking sanctuary in order to challenge negative stereotypes and create a space where refugees can be seen and heard beyond their experience of displacement. We believe that everyone has a contribution to make, and reject the idea that people seeking safety should have to ‘prove their worth’ more than others in society.

Reclaiming ‘Refugee’

We use the word ‘refugee’ because of its legal and historical significance, and because we believe it is important to reclaim it from negative uses. At the same time, we recognise the danger of labels and respect people’s right to decide how they define themselves. Refugee Week celebrates the contributions of everyone seeking safety, regardless of the legal status they hold.

A Space for Many Stories

Refugee Week aims to be an empowering platform where people who have experienced displacement can express themselves on their own terms. We recognise that no single narrative represents ‘the refugee experience’, and support diverse representations of people and experiences through arts and culture.

There is a Bigger Us

We are not the same. Our experiences are different and we do not have equal access to resources and power. But we are also interconnected and interdependent, part of a ‘bigger us’. We believe that the safety of each of us matters to all of us, and strive to come together around shared values of fairness, mutual support, kindness and respect for universal rights.

Open to All

Refugee Week is an open platform and welcomes a wide range of responses suited to many different contexts. As a movement, we aim to make our activities inclusive and remove barriers to participation.

Arts and Culture Create Change

We believe that arts and culture can help us see migration and displacement differently by creating connection across difference, taking the voices and experiences of refugees to new spaces and helping us imagine how we can live better together.

Leadership Matters

We believe that, wherever possible, initiatives about refugee experiences should involve people with lived experience of displacement in their planning and leadership.

Refugees are not a Single Group

We recognise that refugees and asylum seekers are not a single group and have different experiences, including due to race, class, gender, sexuality, age and immigration status.

The Right to be Safe

We believe that everyone deserves a home and has the right to seek safety for themselves and their families.