Angelina Jolie may be a leading Hollywood actor, but she’s also dedicated decades of her life to helping charitable causes across the world. The Oscar winner has travelled to several war-torn countries with the UN, and used her public platform to try to find ways to help. “I found myself a student at their feet,” Jolie told Vogue in 2020. “I have learned more from [refugees] about family, resilience, dignity and survival than I can express.” Not to mention the fact that she’s also established foundations of her own, too.
To mark Jolie’s starring role on the cover of the March issue of British Vogue, we take a closer look at a few of the non-profit organisations she champions, below.
UN Refugee Agency
As a special envoy for the UN, Jolie started visiting refugee camps when she was in her early twenties. While she has financially donated to the UNHCR, she’s also helped to fund long-term health and conservation programmes. And she’s helped to build schools for refugee girls. “Girls at a school I support in Kakuma camp in Kenya have gone on, through sheer hard work and ability, to achieve some of the best exam results in the country,” she wrote for the Financial Times in 2020. “Yet even before the pandemic, half of all refugee children were out of school, and only three per cent of young refugees were able to access higher education. This is a terrible waste of human potential. In this time of coronavirus, initiatives that help girls stay in school are essential.”
Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative
Jolie and the former Foreign Secretary Lord William Hague founded the Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative in 2012. “When it comes down to it, we still treat violence against women as a lesser crime,” Jolie said in 2018. “Over 150 countries have signed a commitment to end impunity for war-zone rape. There are new teams in place to gather evidence and support prosecutions. I was in Kenya last summer as UN peacekeeping troops received new training, since peacekeepers have been part of the problem. We’re working with NATO on training, protection, and getting more women in the military, but there is so far to go.”
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War Child UK
In 2014, Jolie and Stella McCartney launched the Draw Me To Safety Campaign with War Child UK, to help children in peril in war-torn countries. “One of the biggest challenges is to persuade people we can actually change this situation,” she said at the time. “We all agree that rape is a terrible crime. But many people have got used to thinking of it as an inevitable feature of war.”
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It’s a sentiment that she echoed in an interview with Vogue last year: “I see all people as equal. I see the abuse and suffering and I cannot stand by. Around the world, people are fleeing gas attacks, rape, female genital mutilation, beatings, persecution, murder. They do not flee to improve their lives. They flee because they cannot survive otherwise.
She continued: “What I really want is to see an end to what forces people out of their homelands. I want to see prevention when we can, protection when needed and accountability when crimes are committed.”
The Jolie-Pitt Foundation and the Maddox Jolie-Pitt Foundation
Jolie has spoken about falling in love with Cambodia after first visiting it decades ago. In 2002, she adopted her first child, Maddox, from the country. A year later, she established her first foundation, now called the Maddox Jolie-Pitt Foundation. At its core, it aims to end poverty, improve healthcare and education, and protect the environment across the country. “Cambodia was the country that made me aware of refugees,” she told Vogue last year. “It made me engage in foreign affairs in a way I never had, and join UNHCR. Above all, it made me a mom.”
Four years later, Jolie and her now ex-husband, Hollywood actor Brad Pitt, set up another foundation together, the Jolie-Pitt Foundation. It’s main aim is to assist with humanitarian causes across the world. When they launched it, they donated $1 million (£730,000) to Global Action For Children (which ceased operations in 2010), and another million dollars to Doctors Without Borders.
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The March issue of British Vogue is on newsstands on 5 February.
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