Reason to love the Clooneys #58745
Earlier this year George and Amal Clooney brought two children into the world with the birth of twins Ella and Alexander. Now they've pledged to help 3000 others.
In a new partnership between the Clooney Foundation For Justice, UNICEF and Google, £1.7 million of funds will be donated to seven public schools in Lebanon. The money will help to pay for extended school hours that allow Syrian refugee children living in the country to attend classes.
A statement released by the Clooneys said, 'Thousands of young Syrian refugees are at risk - the risk of never being a productive part of society. Formal education can help change that. That's our goal with this initiative. We don't want to lose an entire generation because they had the bad luck of being born in the wrong place at the wrong time.'
Since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Lebanon has been overwhelmed with the arrival of refugees from its neighbouring country. According to data on the UN Refugee Agency website there are now over one million registered Syrian refugees living in Lebanon, many of them children in need of education.
An experienced human rights barrister, British-Lebanese lawyer Amal Clooney (previously Amal Alamuddin) moved with her family to Britain from Lebanon when she was two years old during the Lebanese Civil War.
Amal has already worked on behalf of marginalised groups - including victims of the Armenian Genocide - and last September made a damning speech to the United Nations about its failure to stop the mass enslavement of Yazidi women by ISIS.
Though her marriage to Clooney in 2014 has brought increased press attention to her legal work, she's become pretty adept at batting off unwanted questions. Asked in 2015 what designer she was wearing to court by a reporter she quipped, 'Ede & Ravenscroft', the name of the British tailors who make her black court gown.
