I MATTER / I am human
Children’s voices matter and the camera is a perfect way to help children express themselves. I MATTER, an international portrait exhibition by Chicago/Oslo-based CASE Art Fund, features photographs of children throughout the world stating they matter.
Please join CASE co-founder Anette Skuggedal, and Hanan Ashegh, Executive Director and founder of Goodwill Caravan, a London / Greece-based nonprofit that provides vulnerable populations with a safe place to call home. They will talk about how they raise awareness about children’s human rights through photography. Muddassar Ahmed, an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and former Independent Advisor to the UK government on Muslim communities, will moderate the talk.
Ticket Price: £9.50
Speakers
Anette Skuggedal [b. 1963, Oslo, Norway] holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Communication / Advertising from the University of Texas, Austin. For more than twenty-five years, she worked as an art director in film, advertising, and broadcasting. In 2003, she left the commercial industry to focus on photography, establishing herself as a consultant for private and corporate collections and launched PUG OSLO [Pop Up Gallery]. Through PUG, she worked with internationally acclaimed artists, curating an array of international exhibitions in Stockholm, Oslo, and Japan, publishing books and catalogs for Sally Mann, Roger Ballen, Yamamoto Masao, and Arno Rafael Minkkinen. In 2017, Skuggedal renamed PUG OSLO, opening Lumina Gallery [Serendipity] as part of a cultural art house in downtown Oslo that includes venues for music, film, architecture, and fashion. Lumina Gallery offers an array of workshops, exhibitions, and seminars, and is seen as a leading educator for fine art photography in Oslo. She is the co-founder of CASE Art Fund, am Illinois/Oslo based nonprofit that raises awareness about children’s human rights through the support and exhibition of photography.
Hanan Ashegh is a mental health practitioner, a published Neuroscience researcher, a mother and a humanitarian. Hanan has in-depth experience in providing aid during the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe since 2015. Her humanitarian response work started with mass aid distributions and asylum support for refugee families in the Calais Jungle in 2015-2016.
Hanan volunteered for over a year as an interpreter and care worker for unaccompanied children and minors stuck in the Jungle Refugee Camp in Calais before moving onto humanitarian work in Greece. Hanan founded Goodwill Caravan in 2015 as a response to news reports of the atrocities taking place in Syria and adjoining war-torn countries, and also of missing unaccompanied children in refugee camps in Europe.
Initially, this began with bulk aid distributions, but has grown into protection anti-trafficking services for the most vulnerable displaced populations in Europe and beyond. Hanan then moved on to register Goodwill Caravan Greece and UK in 2017 and slowly gained a team of humanitarians that built what is known today as Goodwill Caravan emergency assistance humanitarian projects in multiple global hotspot locations.
Muddassar Ahmed is an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and former Independent Advisor to the UK government on Muslim communities. Muddassar founded and is the president of The Concordia Forum, a global network of cross-sector Muslim leaders dedicated to building bridges between communities and across cultures. He leads Unitas Communications a reputation management consultancy specialising in the communications interface between the Islamic and Western worlds, leading on projects for the United Nations, U.S. State Department, Amnesty International, Friends of the Earth, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and many others. More recently Muddassar founded ImamConnect, the world’s first online platform and marketplace for Muslim services – and listed as one of the 100 most innovative global Muslim start-ups to watch in 2022.
Muddassar sits on a number of boards including the CASE Art Fund; the John Adams Society, the official UK Association for the U.S. Department of State’s IVLP alumni, of which he is the Founder and President; Global Ties U.S.; International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM); European Network of American Alumni Associations (ENAM); East End Citizens Advice Bureau; Bradford Literature Festival; The Forum for Discussion of Israel and Palestine (FODIP); Islam and Liberty Network Council; and is a Patron of Faiths Forum for London, connecting faith groups in the capital. He is also notably Chairman of one of the largest independent food banks in the UK, the Bow Food Bank. Additionally, Muddassar sits on the Advisory Board of The Atlantic Council and is a Fellow at the German Marshall Fund (GMF) U.S. where he advises on international security, diplomacy, and advancing inclusive leadership programmes. Muddassar has been listed as amongst the 500 most influential Muslims globally and amongst the 1000 most influential Londoners.