We are a team of 100+ volunteers and staff who coordinate youth participation at the global, regional, and thematic level for all migration issues.
MYCP is part of the Major Group for Children and Youth (MGCY) – the official, formal and self-organised space for children and youth (aged below 30) to contribute to and engage in certain intergovernmental and allied policy processes at the UN since 1992. Our mission is to bridge children and youth and the UN system, with a focus on migration issues, in order to ensure that their right to meaningful participation is realised. We do so by engaging children and youth entities in formal and informal forms in the design, implementation, monitoring, follow-up and review of sustainable development policies at all levels in four areas: Policy & Advocacy, Capacity Building, Youth Action and Knowledge.
Marta is the senior Global Focal Point for MYCP, where she has served for the past 3 years. She took this role after her mandate as Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) Focal Point, in which she led and chaired the 2nd Migration Youth Forum at the GFMD in Quito 2020. Her professional background is in international development, having worked in social entrepreneurship and community development in Latin America, and on the 2030 Agenda at UN DESA and at UNODC Bolivia. She holds an MSc from the London School of Economics in Development Management and Anthropology and a BA from the University of Sussex.
Elana is one of MYCP’s GFPs, and the former Asia and Pacific Regional Lead, where she led youth consultations and engagement in the Bali Process and GCM APAC Reviews, and co-organised roundtables with UNICEF, UNESCO, and at the 4th Migration Youth Forum. She has been a panellist for multiple events, including the EUDiF Future Forum, and Expert Group Meeting on the Draft APAC Migration Report 2020. She is also the co-founder of Colours of Edinburgh, a social project promoting the self-expression of refugees and asylum seekers. Elana holds a BA Liberal Arts from Kings College London and an MSc Sociology & Global Change from the University of Edinburgh. She is from Malaysia & Singapore, and lives in Amsterdam.
Moreen Gorial is the Migration Youth and Children Platform’s (MYCP – MGCY) Global Compact for Migration (GCM) Focal Point, where she leads youth engagement in the GCM Process. Moreen has an interdisciplinary background through her studies in STEM and Masters in Globalization. In addition, she has extensive policy experience focusing on governance from her work at the UN, youth-led organizations, and civil society. As both a Canadian Immigrant from an Iraqi minority and a young activist, Moreen is a passionate advocate for bridging inequalities and achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda.
Mónica Trigos holds an MPA degree from Columbia University 21. She has a BA in International Relations from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM). She is the Co-Founder of “Sin Palabras,” an organization dedicated to raising awareness and advocating for a change of narratives and policies on immigration and human rights by using art as a tool for transformational social change. She has worked and done research on immigration, unaccompanied children, asylum and root causes of migration in Mexico and Central America. She currently works supporting the Latino immigrant community in the US.
Culture, migration, and human rights researcher and activist. She has worked in non-profits in Costa Rica and the United States accompanying, translating, and assisting migrant population, and she developed her MA in Anthropology thesis on Social Trauma and Solidarity networks among Nicaraguan refugees in Costa Rica. She has attended and presented in conferences and forums on culture, migration, and human rights in Central America and the United States. Her main interest is to use ethnographic research to enrich the comprehension and management of cultural diversity and international migration.
As a young migrant herself, Alexandra is one of the creators of the MYCP Let’s Talk Migration platform combating xenophobia by giving youth the tools and content they need to fight it. Alexandra is a passionate, young communicator for social impact and has acted as a spokesperson for the rights of young migrants at the GFMD, the negotiations for the GCM or the Child-Friendly Cities Summit. She is also a youth ambassador for the Step-Up Campaign against Gender-based Violence, the UN Women Youth Lead Programme and Fashion Takes Action. Alexandra has a BA in Social Sciences from the University of Stuttgart and is currently doing her master’s in Communication Management.
Bosa is an admitted Attorney, Conveyancer and Notary Public in the Courts of Botswana. Her professional objective is to be an expert in the fields of International Human Rights Law, Immigration Law and Public International Law.
Moreover, She has over 5 years experience in social justice advocacy. She has volunteered for a wide array of International Organisations advocating on issues relating to Migration, Peace and Security and Sexual Reproductive Health Rights(SRHR). She is currently the Africa Regional Lead on Migration of the UN General Assembly-mandated Major Group for Children and Youth.
As an international development professional, Alicja manages projects focusing on socioeconomic development on behalf of the UK FCDO and European Union in Africa, Middle East, Southeast Asia and Western Europe. Her work and research interests focus on rights-based migration governance. Alicja advised on international mobility solutions in Vietnam and the Netherlands, delivered research on the EU Mobility Partnerships and supported the African Union Commission’s migration policy development. She holds a Bachelor’s degree from Sciences Po Paris, and an MSc in Public Administration with specialisation in Governance of Migration and Diversity from Erasmus University Rotterdam. Currently Alicja is based in Chile.
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
Ms Camilla Ioli’s involvement in migration issues started very early when she started volunteering for the local group of Amnesty International during high school. Her support and advocacy efforts concerned mostly the right to education and the access to services for migrants and the Roma community. She then pursued a degree in law from the university of Bologna and a MSc in Forced Migration and Refugee Studies from the University of Oxford. Whilst at Oxford, she focused on the local dimension of migration policies in rural communities and their ability to enhance protection mechanisms for irregular migrants. During her university years in Italy, she was active in the legal clinic supporting migrant detainees in the prison of Bologna and she broadly researched EU and Australian migration and asylum policies at the Australian National University Centre for EU Studies in Australia. Once back in Italy, she started to work at all stages of the asylum procedure on behalf of the Asylum Support Office. After having worked at disembarkation areas, and in the administrative organ assessing international protection’s claims. She is currently based in the tribunal of Catania, Sicily, where she supports the judicial specialised section on International Protection whilst training to become a qualified lawyer. She has presented nationally and Internationally on asylum and migration policies in Italy, Germany, England, Australia and New Zealand. She is part of a multicultural dance group performing traditional dances from every part of the world ‘The sand women’. She is the EU regional focal point for UNMGCY where she lead the regional EU GCM Process.
Minh Nguyen is a student of Global Studies and Diploma of French at Monash University. She migrated to Australia from Vietnam when she was 11 years old, and her interest in international affairs became largely driven by a passion for making the political sphere socially and economically accessible to ethnic minorities and youth.
She is currently serving as the Asia-Pacific Regional Lead for the Migration Youth and Children Platform, of the Major Group for Children and Youth, where she has been instrumental in the management of national youth consultations for the Global Compact for Migration Asia-Pacific Regional Review, where she also co-designed one of the official stakeholder consultation roundtables, and key partnerships with UNICEF, UNESCO, and the Economic and Social Commission for the Asia and Pacific.
She has also been key in significantly growing MYCP’s network of young migrants and leaders in migration policy in Asia and the Pacific, where a large proportion of discussions have focused on the effects of, and recovery from, COVID-19. She also serves as Academic Officer for the Monash International Affairs Society, where she furthers the meaningful participation of youth in high level processes whether it be during high-level conferences or SDGs implementation.
Frans is a student at Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines with a
background in European Studies and International Relations. She has four years of progressive experience dealing with migration-related projects and previously served as an undergraduate assistant at the Scalabrini Migration Center, Philippines. Inspired by her grandmother’s stories as a former domestic worker in Greece, her research interests lie within labor migration, feminization of workforces, and the migration-development nexus. In the future, she aspires to work as a development practitioner and migration scholar.
Sarah Badr is the MENA regional Lead based in Egypt, for the Migration Youth and Children Platform. Sarah and the team led the first Global Compact on Migration consultations in the Arab region and participated in the Global Forum on Migration and Development 2021. Sarah is the World Youth Forum’s official spokeswoman and member since 2017, a platform for youth to recommend views on pressing global challenges to policy-leaders worldwide. She holds an MSc in Engineering and Finance from Imperial College London and a BSc in Geoscience from Alexandria University. She’s passionate about policy-advocacy, focused on humanitarian and environmental thematic.
Kyle Heitmann is the Human Rights and Protection of Migrants Lead at UNMGCY and is a human rights lawyer based in Incheon, South Korea. He is specialized in international environmental and international migration law. His J.D. is from Santa Clara University in California, and he subsequently earned an LL.M. from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. He has lived and worked in Costa Rica and contributed substantially to a brief filed before the Inter-American Human Rights Commission regarding a development project in rural Belize. He worked with migrants in Phoenix, San Diego, and San Francisco, and relatedly, he co-authored a policy memorandum examining the legal means by which the State of California could protect its DACA-recipient residents’ work authorization.
Camila has been working with marginalized communities and women’s empowerment for more than 10 years. She is COO at Migraflix, a social startup that promotes the economic inclusion of refugees and immigrants by promoting cultural entrepreneurship. As women’s rights activist, she has experience at CEDAW Committee/UN and a master in “Access to Justice for women living in poverty”. At the MYCP, in 2020/21 she led the 3rd Migration Youth Forum and co-led with Marta Verani the formalization of the group’s work with the GFMD Steering Group. She is a fellow at the BMW Foundation and was awarded by the UNAOC as one of the “150 youth voices of tomorrow”.
Maddi joined the MYCP in 2018 in Morocco as a representative of Arab CSOs, and having led the MENA team as Regional Advisor throughout 2020, now sits on the Board.
She has been in the migration and displacement sector since 2013, working as a case worked with undocumented migrants in Spain and Morocco. She is currently the Program Coordinator at Save the Children’s Migration and Displacement Initiative, having spent five years previously at the field level in Lebanon, with a large local NG – Amel – focusing on programs and research, in the fields of health and labour migration specifically.
