Commencing on June 1 and continuing all month long, Kids Entertainment Professionals for Young Refugees (KEPYR), the award-winning children’s media charity, will host its 8th annual “Kindred Spirits” campaign, this year in aid of the over half million Rohingya Muslim children living in the world’s largest refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.
Over a million Rohingya have been driven from their homes in Myanmar since 2017, fleeing a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing carried out by that country’s rogue military regime. The United Nations has called the Rohingya “the most persecuted minority in the world.”
Via their website, KEPYR will offer the opportunity to donate to UNICEF USA’s critical aid work in Cox’s Bazar as well as an exclusive eBay auction featuring art from top talent. This year’s artists include multiple award-winning cartoonist, writer, and creator Matt Groening (The Simpsons, Futurama, Disenchantment, Life in Hell); Ben 10 co-creator and Eisner-nominated comics cover artist Dave Johnson; fellow comics heavyweight Dan Brereton (X-Men, Justice League, Nocturnals); Martin Baynton, the British author, illustrator and producer famous for his classic children’s book and animated series Jane and the Dragon; and Sean McManus, revered for his work on Sandman, Swamp Thing and Fables for DC Comics.
“To the extent they are on people’s radars at all, the Rohingya are at best on the periphery of our consciousness here in the West,” noted Grant Moran, Head of KEPYR. “They’re geographically distant from us, their plight has been dragging on since 2017, and right now other urgent displacement crises, in Gaza and Sudan in particular, are understandably commanding the headlines. So, there is a real danger of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ with the Rohingya. It’s at the heart of KEPYR’s mission to shine light on children who can far too easily be forgotten and to provide our entertainment community with a simple way to put into positive action Fred Rogers’ reminder that ‘We are intimately related. May we never even pretend that we are not.’ For us in kids’ media, that means all children are our business.”
Information about KEPYR and Kindred Spirits 2024 can be found, and donations made, at www.kepyr.org.
Honored by the White House in 2021 with a President’s Volunteer Service Award for “dedicated service to children around the world”, KEPYR was founded by industry professionals in 2017 to spread awareness in the children’s media community about the global child refugee crisis, the worst since WWII, and to rally support for UNICEF’s heroic work serving displaced children everywhere.
KEPYR’s Board of Directors comprises Grant Moran, Yang Chang, Aurora Simcovich, Johnny Hartmann, Scott Gray, Monica Dollive, and Juliette Rogasik. Serving on KEPYR’s Advisory Board are Christopher Keenan, Jean Thoren, Greg Payne, Jo Kavanagh-Payne, Maca Rotter, Danielle Gillis, Martin Baynton, Gushi Sethi, Sabrina Propper, Dave Palmer, and Baman Rusby.
