Refugees International’s 2026 Advocacy Awards

McCall-Pierpaoli Humanitarian Awardee: Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey

Jacob Frey fell in love with Minneapolis while running the Twin Cities Marathon. The day after graduating from law school, he moved across the country to make Minneapolis his new home. After practicing law and winning the city’s first annual Martin Luther King Jr. Award for his civil rights work, Jacob served as a City Council Member for Ward 3 before being elected as the 48th mayor of Minneapolis.

Under his leadership, the city has led the nation in affordable housing policy, producing 8.5 times the amount of deeply affordable housing compared to before he took office. He pioneered the elimination of exclusionary zoning, setting a national example, and has led the city through crisis to improve safety, revitalize downtown, and drive economic growth through inclusive policies. Jacob’s commitment to change was further demonstrated in 2021 when voters approved an entirely new form of government, ensuring more effective, equitable, and efficient city services for everyone in the great city of Minneapolis.

The McCall-Pierpaoli Humanitarian Award honors individuals who have made significant contributions to advance the rights and safety of displaced people. It celebrates a person’s leadership, passion, and commitment toward humanitarian values, making a difference in the world. The award itself is named for David and Penny McCall and Yvette Pierpaoli, dedicated humanitarians who died tragically during a fact-finding trip for Refugees International in Albania in 1999. Past honorees include Oscar-winning actor Ke Huy Quan, Syria’s White Helmets, Chef José Andrés, and Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya.

Richard C. Holbrooke Leadership Awardee: Dr. Thaer Ahmad, in honor of medical professionals in Gaza

Dr. Thaer Ahmad is a board-certified emergency medicine physician, global health expert, and humanitarian who has provided medical relief in some of the world’s most devastated conflict zones, including Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, and Kenya. He has completed five medical missions to Gaza and most recently spent a month working with the Palestinian Red Crescent in Hebron. Dr. Ahmad has since been denied entry into Gaza by Israeli authorities on four separate occasions, citing his Palestinian heritage and advocacy work in the United States and before the EU and UN.

He currently serves as an attending physician at Advocate Christ Medical Center, where he also holds the roles of Assistant Program Director for the Emergency Medicine Residency Program and Global Health Director for the Emergency Department. Dr. Ahmad is an Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

He serves on the board of the Palestinian American Medical Association, a humanitarian NGO dedicated to building healthcare capacity in underserved communities, and is a past board member of MedGlobal. He also serves on the advisory board of the Borgen Project.

The Richard C. Holbrooke Leadership Award honors and recognizes those in local civil society who are so often the unsung heroes of displacement crises, the kind of crises that Refugees International has made its mission to alleviate. The award was created to recognize those individuals who work tirelessly to improve community-based services for refugees. Richard C. Holbrooke was a great American statesman, a tremendous diplomat, and a true humanitarian who fought for justice through diplomacy. This is the spirit that he brought to Refugees International as Chairman of the Board from 1996-1999 and as a board member for more than a decade. Past honorees include Sudan Emergency Response Rooms, Humane Borders, and South Sudan Women United.

About the Artist for this Year’s Theme: Reem Yassouf

A multidisciplinary visual artist. Graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Damascus in Syria, she worked as a jewelry designer until 2010. She left Syria in 2012 following the war and has been living in France since 2015. She later obtained a Master’s degree at ESADHaR (École Supérieure d’Art et Design Le Havre-Rouen) in France.

Her artistic journey is shaped by a personal history marked by the crossing of different cultures and borders, which deeply influence her practice. Her work explores both personal and collective questions related to the transformations of memory between past and present. These themes are an integral part of life as we live it today, deeply rooted in our daily existence on human, social, and even political levels. Her work oscillates between absence and presence, within temporal and geographical contexts in constant change, exploring the relationship between the body, material, and space.

She has gradually developed a transversal approach integrating painting, installation, drawing, sculpture, performance, and other mixed techniques.

Her work examines the relationship between materials, gestures, and contexts of creation: she often uses raw or organic materials, chosen for their link to collective or personal memory, sometimes in relation to the body. The transformation of matter, light, and transparency become vectors of reflection on instability, transitional spaces, and the visible and invisible boundaries between beings and places. Her works oscillate between absence and presence, between what remains and what disappears. They question the connections between past and present, silence and voice, loss and transformation. Through her projects, she addresses the tensions experienced by displaced bodies, affective archives, and fragmented memories. She envisions the body as a territory in mutation, crossed by personal and collective narratives.

She has participated in numerous workshops, residencies, and cultural events, both in Europe and the Middle East. She has also contributed to the organization of artistic projects, notably as co-founder of the independent art festival Khan Al Fnoun (2014–2016) in Jordan, conceived as an alternative space for creation and collaboration. Her work has been featured in various cultural publications, such as books, research studies, and poetry, notably with UNESCO for the cover of the Summer Book in collaboration with Oxford University in 2014.

Her works have been exhibited at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, the contemporary art center Maison des Arts in Malakoff–Paris, Palais Iéna in Paris, 15Art & 15Art London, the contemporary art center Hangar 107 in Rouen–France, the contemporary art center Le Portique in Le Havre, and Le Radar in Bayeux–France. They are also included in collections and presented by UNESCO, the World Bank in Washington DC, Cultural Narratives, the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs in Paris, the Atassi Foundation, as well as in private collections.