Our Trustees
At the heart of forRefugees
Amber Bauer, CEO & Founder
Amber enjoyed a successful 20-year career in procurement and business transformation prior to 2015. However, when the refugee crisis began to unfold, she volunteered in Greece (where she first met another of forRefugees’ trustees, Ingrid) and Northern France. Following these experiences, Amber retired from an executive position in industry and forRefugees was born.
In mid-2016, forRefugees was officially registered and by October that year it had awarded its first grant. Since then, over 80 grassroots organisations acting as a lifeline for refugee women, children and men on the borders of Europe have received 300+ one-off and emergency grants.
Amber and her husband have hosted refugees in their home for many years through the organisation Refugees at Home. She also spends several weeks each year undertaking self-funded trips to the field, meeting and supporting our grassroots partners and gaining valuable experience which informs deeply the day-to-day running of the charity.
Delia Nadarajah, Chair of Trustees
Delia works as a Project Management Consultant, bringing many transferable skills to her role as Chair of Trustees. Also a passionate writer, she’s a member of The Society of Authors.
What struck Delia most about our CEO, Amber, when she first met her was the kindness and humanity she exuded, qualities not always seen at the forefront in everyday life. Horrified by the mainstream rhetoric towards vulnerable people who have no choice but to seek refuge, she was eager to accept the opportunity to get involved in such a worthy cause.
Laura Darwish, Treasurer
Laura is an ACCA-qualified accountant with six years’ experience. She currently works as a Finance Business Partner in the NHS, and joined forRefugees as Treasurer in 2023.
She first became involved in volunteering following the news reports in 2015 of refugees travelling through Europe, the coverage of Alan Kurdi's death affecting her particularly deeply.
She’s volunteered in Calais, Northern Greece and the Aegean Islands. Most recently, she volunteers in London supporting asylum seekers living in hotels in her local area. She continues to be appalled by the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers by the UK and other European governments, feeling compelled to help in any way she can.
Nima Moradi, Trustee
Nima has lived experience of migration, spending many years as an asylum seeker before settling in the UK, where he’s now training to be a nurse whilst working part-time in a care home for dementia patients. He’s been a forRefugees trustee since January 2022.
Born in Tehran to a close family and receiving a good education, at 15 he started to question Iran’s religion and politics, becoming an activist in an attempt to make his country better. At university, he was warned that the regime (the Iranian government) knew about his activities, leaving him at immediate risk of arrest and probably execution. Although angry and full of sadness at the prospect of having to leave his country, he felt he had no choice. Over the next few years, he lived a harrowing life as an asylum seeker, crossing first the border to Turkey and then the dangerous Aegean Sea to Greece.
He and our CEO, Amber, first met whilst volunteering for an organisation on Samos, where Nima spent many years. He later came to the UK via France, crossing the Channel, like so many, on a tiny boat. There, he reconnected with Amber. When the Home Office sent him from London to the ex-army barracks in Folkestone, Amber quickly noticed his declining mental health and invited him to live with her and her husband.
Now that he’s able to build a life in the UK, Nima joined forRefugees as a trustee so that he can continue to help and support others. You can read more about his journey in Refugee Stories (written by another of our other trustees, Merel).
Ingrid van Loo, Trustee
Ingrid is a retired General Practitioner living in London, having moved to the UK 30 years ago as a medical student from the Netherlands. Her lifelong passion for helping others continues into her retirement - she spends the majority of her time doing charity work, including in her role as trustee for forRefugees since 2021.
Like our CEO, Amber, Ingrid has also hosted refugees in her home since 2015, so she has a deep empathy with the difficulties faced by those seeking safety. This empathy is combined with a relentless and infectious energy that sees her accompanying us on most of our self-funded trips to Europe to visit our partners.
Merel Graeve, Trustee
Merel’s passion for refugee solidarity began in 2015 when she spent several months volunteering in the notorious Moria Camp on the Greek island of Lesvos, witnessing thousands of people arriving on dinghies each day. It was here that she realised her passion for writing, sharing online the stories of the people who arrived. These posts court the attention of our CEO, Amber, and started her on her own humanitarian path to setting up forRefugees.
Merel has extensive experience working with refugees. In 2016, she moved to northern Greece and set up a community centre for the residents of one of the camps, which ran until the camp’s closure in 2019. Now working in the film and TV industry, and splitting her time between work in London and family in the Netherlands, Merel joined forRefugees as a trustee at the end of 2023.
She continues to write, publishing interviews with some of the extraordinary people we meet, including our trustee, Nima, in Refugee Journeys.
Tom Steadman, Trustee
Tom is a communications activist, digital content creator and poet who joined forRefugees as a trustee at the start 2024. He volunteered in Calais ‘Jungle’ camp for 4 months, working day and night to film the feature documentary ‘On Our Doorstep’.
In the years since, Tom was Head of Communications for for a well-known humanitarian charity for 3 years, helping grow the organisation from a hashtag to an internationally respected NGO that has helped over a million people.
He has run campaigns to free human rights activists at Amnesty International and created mental health awareness apps with the Guardian. Now, he’s a freelance digital campaigner delivering social impact campaigns with organisations including Greenpeace and the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants.
Chris McQuillan, Trustee
Chris is a contracts and procurement manager working in the public sector. During several periods throughout his career he’s partnered with the non-profit sector, spending many years fundraising on behalf of a variety of developmental and humanitarian aid charities.
Chris is a blend of Austrian and Irish heritage, with members from both families being forced to relocate for either economic or political reasons. During WWII, his grandfather was one of the many millions forced to flee and go into hiding with his family until the war’s conclusion in 1945.
Chris is also a writer and author, chronicling his attempt to walk the British coastline with his dog Moose. It was during this venture that Chris became closely involved with forRefugees and our work. He joined us as a trustee in March 2024.
