Pop song, We All Stand Together features a youth chorus and two up-and-coming student singers to build awareness of and raise funds for more than 50 million refugee children worldwide. Victims of war, conflict, weather, poverty and disease, their plight gets little attention.

NEW YORK, NY / ACCESS Newswire / March 24, 2026 / Refugee children will be the beneficiaries of a creative initiative centered on a new pop song, "We All Stand Together." It has been created to increase awareness of and raise funds for the more than 50 million displaced children around the world. They are victims of war, conflict, religious persecution, climate disasters, food and water scarcity, and gang violence. The number is growing, while government funding is declining.

Written by Michael Orland (American Idol) and Judy Winger Quay with lyrics by Brian Seth Hurst, the digital single, engineered by Miklos Malek, features up-and-coming singers Bella Stine of California and Lea Jade García of Texas, a chorus from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV), and 12 students from Pharr-San Juan-Alamo Southwest High School. It is available at stand4childrensong.com for $10. Proceeds will go to Austin-based nonprofit Global Impact Initiative (Gii), which helps refugee families and children around the globe.

Stand Together for Children is a project of New York City-based social benefit firm Channel4Cause. The campaign was produced by award-winning filmmaker Jeff Oppenheim and nonprofit and social cause expert Alibe Hamacher. Oppenheim and Hamacher are founding members of Channel4Cause and the visionaries behind the campaign. The campaign includes the song, a forthcoming music video, and a feature-length documentary, "The Resilience of Innocence: The Making of the Stand Together Project." The song's message: "If we all stand together, not a break in the human chain, if we all stand together, we all stand to gain."

"We envision this campaign as sustainable over many years," said Hamacher. "It will inspire change and goodwill while raising resources to help safeguard children on the move." UNICEF and Save the Children estimate that the number of refugee children under 18 exceeds 50 million.

Orland and Oppenheim envisioned the project as a youth-driven campaign and brought on Stine and García to be the lead singers. Both college students are deeply committed to the cause. The youth choir represents youth engagement on an even deeper level.

Through the Rotary Club of Mission, Texas, the producers met with Dean Jeffrey Ward of the UTRGV School of Fine Arts. With a 90.1% Latino enrollment, UTRGV and its choir offered a dynamic vocal and symbolic attraction, as many singers are either immigrants or the children of immigrants. As such, the University's choir would be the ideal group to record the song, and the Rotary Club pledged its support to make that happen.

Orland and Malek worked with choir director Sean Taylor to arrange and record the choral section. Oppenheim and Hamacher worked with students from UTRGV's film program who filmed the performance. "This helped to empower them professionally while, as the primary storytellers, they chronicled the student singers," said Oppenheim.

Hamacher, a native of Chile, noted that, "The average length of time a refugee child spends in a camp can be up to twenty years. She also cites their struggles to find a balance between their new environments and their home countries. "Even once settled in their new homes, children often encounter enormous cultural barriers, from language to religious rituals to diet, leaving them to feel very much like outsiders." Hamacher engaged Global Impact Initiative as the primary nonprofit partner for the campaign, as its mission addresses these challenges and others in its work with families locally and internationally.

Anjum Malik, founder of Gii, explains: "When families feel respected and supported, children feel it immediately." Gii's mission is to empower vulnerable and underserved communities to achieve economic independence through education, employment, and community engagement. "That sense of belonging," Malik added, "becomes the foundation for everything else. It opens the door to learning, growth, confidence, resilience, and hope for the future."

"Stand Together represents the whole Rio Grande Valley community as it not only brings attention to the community here but also presents parallels to children on the move," said vocalist Lea Jade García, a biology major at UTRGV. A second-generation Texan, she is following in the footsteps of her father, singer/songwriter Leo Alejandro García.

Lea already has a budding career in classical Mariachi but is now launching into mainstream pop and Latin music. "This song cuts close to home," said Lea, "and as a global youth ambassador to this project, I can give voice to my local community here in the RGV and my Latino community at large."

Bella Lily Stine, the other vocalist and global youth ambassador, is a native of Bakersfield, CA, and has been singing since a very young age. She is the voice of the iconic character Lucy Van Pelt in the Cartoon Network's animated series, "Peanuts" (created by Charles Schulz).

Bella stated, "Stand Together's message is to make us all understand - especially American kids my age - that any of us are vulnerable to being on the move." Bella, a major in commercial music and communications, added, "Music is universal, so it is perhaps the best way to build awareness. By lifting my voice as a singer, I am also standing together with the young people of the world."

Contact: Frank Gómez, f.gomez@channel4cause.com

SOURCE: Channel4Cause