The London Mayor’s office hosted and featured I Am Your Protector at the City Hall. The collection of Protectors from London were exhibited in conjunction with National Hate Crime Awareness Week and open to the public for 3 weeks in October.

I Am Your Protector honored and highlighted Protectors from London with an award ceremony and reception to celebrate them, who inspire us and who reflect the best of the spirit of this unique, diverse and open city, committed to the idea of people standing up for each other, of being each other’s Protectors.

Photo credit: Eva Scherly

We are so grateful to our partners Mypromovideos for their vision, talent and the thougthfulness they poured into creating this video highlighting inspiring stories that honor protectors and shares ways we can rise to be each other’s Protectors. Special thanks to the entire crew at Mypromovideos including Creative Director Vimida M Das, Animator Saravanan R, Illustrator Mohan Kumar N, Music & SFX Suriya Boomibalan, Account Manager Anil Kumar, and Project Manager Mahesh Babu D.

At the opening of the two week long exhibition featuring an I Am Your Protector collection at the United Nation’s headquarters in Geneva with 350 ambassadors, dignitaries and representatives of the Civil Society. The Director-General of the United Nations Headquarters, Geneva expressed the importance of having the courage to raise a Protectors in particular in times of polarization and tension.

NYU, Design for America and I Am Your Protector partnered on a Human Centered Design Thinking Bootcamp to melt hate in innovative ways. The bootcamp was filled with intense learning, sparkling creativity and laughter. It was led by Anne-Laure Fayard, Professor of Technology Management and Innovation at NYU, is also the faculty advisor for the NYU studio of Design for America who aims to tackle social issues through human-centered design. Before teaching in New York, she was a faculty member at INSEAD, in Singapore and in Fontainebleau. She has also been visiting scholar with the Center of Sociology of Innovation at Ecole des Mines in Paris and with Design London and the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at Imperial College in London.

Shared Studio invites us to have conversations face to face with people in an other part of the world as if we were in the same room.

I Am Your Protector has the pleasure to partner with Shared Studio and having conversations wile sharing a meal together from New York with Kabul and Heart in Afghanistan. It felt like meeting with new friends at coffeeshop, sharing about our personal lives, our views on the world and laughing together.

Photo credit: Yadin Goldman and Shared Studio

Exhibition engagement and conversations featuring Protectors, youth share about different communities standing up for each other.

The I Am Your Protector TV and Radio show aired over 20 episodes in the Balkans, featuring Protectors, members of various religious and ethnic communities, sociologists, historians to highlight testimonies and stories of Protectors reminding us how we can change the course of history when we rise as each other’s Protectors. Today we can melt hate and rise as each other’s protectors.

On the International Holocaust Remeberance Day, a collection of Protectors during the Holocaust in particular Muslim Protectors who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, as well as contemporaneous examples of people protecting each other, in a context of rising hatred were exhibited at Temple Emmanuel in New York, largest Synagogue in the world.

The keynote speaker, Dr. Mehnaz Afridi, renowned Muslim scholar originally from Pakistan who heads the Holocaust Center at the Manhattan College.

The City of Geneva hosted a two week long large scale public exhibition “SE SOUVENIR POUR RÉINVENTER L’AVENIR” featuring Protectors of an I Am Your Protector Collection.

The exhibition’s Inoguration was opened by Guillaume Barazzone, Mayor of Geneva, Metin Arditi, writter and UNESCO’s Special Envoy for Intercultural Dialogue, Martine Brunschwig Graf, president of the Federal Commission against Racism and other dignitaries.

Throughout the two weeks classes of highschool visit the exhibition with their teachers and trained pedagogist on the site about Protectors.

I Am Your Protector presented a theater performance in Times Square with 1,000 people re-enacting thoughtprovoking testimonies and stories of  Protectors. The performances was directed by the Living Theater.