Experience

UniRef - University for Refugees

• Switzerland
• Philanthropy
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Founder and President

  • May 2013 - Present

  UniRef - Swiss International Humanitarian Organization (UniRef - SIHO) is a non-profit Organization, Swiss recognized charity, that supports people displaced by armed conflict and living in refugee camps under the protection of UNHCR and the Red Crescent. The UniRef mission provides refugees university education and vocational training so that they can leave the camps and integrate into their regional labor market. UniRef is a humanitarian, academic and development initiative aimed at making these young refugees less dependent of international humanitarian aid. Yvelyne Wood is currently developing a new mission in Jordan for the benefit of the Syrian refugees placed under the protection of the Red Crescent. The university education program is implemented in partnership with Isra University and the University of Jordan, and the vocational training, in partnership with the Jordanian Red Crescent.



Artiste

• Artiste

  • 1995 - Present

  Yvelyne Wood, visual artist, sculptor and scenographer, calls herself a "memory sensor". These memories, which she collected with obstinacy, find their source in the inheritance of Humanity, and in particular in its shadows: the memory of the wars that shook the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. The materials that she uses for her installations are all full of history. They are archives of war, original writings, railway rails, oxidized metal, lead from old roofs ... The soul of her sculptures are the testimonies of the holders of these memories: survivors or historians. Very soon immersed in the ferment of History, through the war stories that marked her childhood, Yvelyne Wood makes her artistic career an engagement, a testimony that gives us to see the news through the filter of the history and her artist's look. After studying Art History at the Ecole du Louvre, Yvelyne Wood leaves Europe with determination, responding to the need to distance herself from her own culture. She stayed for 8 years in Japan, where she learned sculpture and modeling. In 1995, she returned to Europe and moved to Geneva, in the heart of the old city. Since then, her works have been exhibited in France, New York and Geneva, including the United Nations in 2002, under the patronage of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Her work has also been supported by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the United Nations, ONPRA and the Ministry of Culture in France.