KEY POINTS
- Financial deadlock for the organisation
- Thousands of refugees become recipients of aid
- Love for fellow human beings from the expatriate
Heading up one of Australia's best-known refugee charities - the Victorian Asylum Seekers Resource Centre - Con Karapanagiotidis is not forgetting his roots.
Having grown up in a small Victorian country town, Mount Beauty, Mr Karapanagiotidis experienced first-hand the exploitation of his parents who worked in factories.
A human rights lawyer himself, he recalls what his grandparents experienced as refugees fleeing the Pontian genocide in Anatolia, extending a helping hand to those in need.
"We help refugees here in Australia with medicine, with food, with lawyers, to see doctors, to learn English and to find work. Every year 7,000 come to our organisation for help," he said.
