Melissa Fleming

Melissa Fleming, Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications at the United Nations, calls on all of us to think of refugees as more than just temporary guests, languishing in limbo and waiting for the war to end back home. Rather, they should receive education, training and work, enabling them to triumph over their trauma and become agents of positive change and social transformation. 

Fleming notes that more than 82 million people around the world have been forced to flee their homes. Among them are more than 26 million refugees, around half of whom are under the age of 18. But she believes that citing statistics to illustrate human suffering only leaves people numb. Instead, she tells the compelling human stories to reach people's hearts and stir them to help. 

Fleming's 2017 book A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea was born out of the story of a young Syrian refugee, Doaa Al Zamel, who survived one of the worst refugee shipwrecks on the Mediterranean Sea, saving a baby girl, which she first told in her 2015 TED Talk.