Jugend rettet
The association behind the ship: how an idea became a rescue mission.
In spring 2015, news of the dying in the Mediterranean arrived daily. In April 2015 alone, more than a thousand people drowned in two shipwrecks.
Unwilling to watch, and inspired by organisations like Alarm Phone, Sea-Watch and Médecins Sans Frontières, a group of young students in Berlin set out to found an association: Jugend Rettet.
The idea: to take part in civilian search and rescue in the central Mediterranean, and to campaign, educate and protest in Germany, drawing attention to the fate of people at Europe's external borders, and to those responsible for it. Jugend Rettet was never only a humanitarian project. It was rooted in something broader: in the anti-racist and anti-fascist movement fighting for the right to freedom of movement for all, for solidarity, and for the vision of a different Europe.
That same summer, thousands of refugees were stranded at eastern European borders. What began on September 1st as the March of Hope did not end in a massacre on a highway or at the fences of a camp. It ended at Munich's main station, where people on the move were met with applause. Carried by that momentum, Jugend Rettet launched its first projects and a fundraising campaign for a ship.
On October 3rd, 2015, the association was officially registered.
On May 19th, 2016, the purchase contract was signed.
On June 9th, the conversion work began.
By June 24th, the ship had a name: IUVENTA.
Five weeks later, she left for her first mission and rescued 1,388 people.
The association found a partner in the Kreuzberger Kinderstiftung, which provided a loan of €130,000 to purchase the vessel. A crowdfunding campaign raised an additional €140,000, which went towards the conversion and the financing of the first missions. Individuals, companies and organisations contributed labour and donations in kind, among them medicines, life rafts and materials for the refit.
While the ship was based in Malta, the association's back office remained in Berlin, where the infrastructure of the mission was built and maintained: media work, fundraising, political work. In the early days, also the coordination of the missions themselves: crew planning, sourcing mission-critical supplies. This work, often invisible and rarely in the spotlight, was what made it possible for others to do the life-saving work at sea. Like the ship's crew, the crew in Berlin was made up of volunteers: people who may never set foot on a rescue ship, writing press releases, managing donations, coordinating crew rotations, keeping the operation running from living rooms and kitchen tables.