With the announcement of the first Refugee Olympic Team in history at the 2016 Rio Olympics, UNICEF and Purpose partnered to fulfill a huge opportunity; to educate and inspire a new, mainstream audience on the refugee crisis through an unexpected lens — the universal appeal of sport.

We created #TeamRefugees, a brand, campaign, and story-driven content series with the goal of inspiring Olympics viewers to embrace and support the Refugee Olympic Team. In turn we sought to begin a large-scale cultural perception shift of refugees to challenge misconceptions that refugees are weak and dependent by telling the stories of the heroic, hard-working, and resilient athletes competing in the games.

This campaign, which garnered over 500MM organic impressions made an incredible impact by measurably improving public social sentiment towards refugees, and attracting support from world leaders and public figures like President Barack Obama, Pope Francis, Justin Trudeau, Malala Yousafsi, among many others. The brand campaign and content also won a Silver Lovie Award and a People’s Lovie Award.

As creative strategist and project manager on this campaign, I remotely oversaw our on-the-ground reporting team in Rio, collaborated with a team of strategists to drive influencer outreach, worked with production partners to amplify our messaging, planned and executed our flagship Opening Ceremony event, oversaw design and production of #TeamRefugees branded merchandise, among other key responsibilities.