Josie Naughton (now Fernandez-Marelli) was working as the personal assistant to the manager of Coldplay when she set up, with three other co-founders, the charity Help Refugees, renamed in 2019 as Choose Love. It has become one of the largest grassroots organisations in the world, providing humanitarian aid, volunteer support, funding and advocacy for refugees.

So far, Choose Love has reached more than 8.5 million people via more than 600 partners in 51 countries. Next Thursday, they celebrate their 10th anniversary with a fundraising concert at the Royal Albert Hall. Its stellar line-up includes James Blake, Jessie Ware, Mabel, Max Porter and Labrinth, and 100% of the profits will go to the charity.

After a decade on the humanitarian frontline, here are the 10 things Fernandez-Marelli says she has learned:

We were a group of friends with no experience in the charity world back in 2015, but, like so many people at the time, we felt compelled to do something and show our solidarity with displaced people. It was so shocking to think so many of them were in Calais, right on our doorstep. We hoped to raise £1,000 and gather some aid, but we had a response we could have never have imagined – that amount turned to £50,000 quickly. It taught me that people are really capable of that kind of action at speed.

When our first shipments of aid went to Calais and Greece, seeing the situation on the ground with our own eyes was really shocking. I expected to see the government or big organisations taking care of people, but instead we saw families, children and the elderly living outside, without shoes on, with nowhere to sleep. And rather than the police standing by or helping, they were actually tormenting these people. It was a real penny-drop moment for me – that these crises were not just strictly humanitarian, but also partly man-made.

It’s devastating to see people who have had to leave everything that they have behind, but so many of them still welcome you into their shelter or their tent, and it’s immaculate inside. They've managed to somehow make where they live beautiful, and they want to cook you a meal, to welcome you in, despite the awful circumstances in which they find themselves. That generosity of spirit has been so incredible and so inspiring.

Music is a universal language. I’ve seen that in force everywhere – in camps where there are so many different nationalities and people come together singing, playing and listening to songs. We’ve also helped lots of grassroots community centres, and when you go into them, they’re often filled with art and music – such imagination and creativity. Those things can speak to people as much as words can.

Working with incredible people like Waad Al-Kateab, who made the [2019 documentary] film For Sama, and whose organisation we support, revealed to me again the heroism of everyday people. Her husband was a doctor, and they were besieged in Aleppo in Syria; she made a film about the atrocities of the Assad regime, the doctors staying in hospitals saving lives, and about her and her husband having their baby and trying to live as normal life as possible. To see her speak at the UN, win a Bafta and be nominated for an Oscar was incredible. And we’ve also worked with the White Helmets in Syria, who rescue people from the rubble – their capacity for humanity just absolutely floors me. People like them and Waad are the reason that we do what we do.

When you’ve seen unaccompanied children sleeping outside, with emergency services not helping them, you instantly feel that a big part of your job is to make people across government know about it – but then you discover, oh, wow, no, they do already know, and they're not doing anything about it. As much as humanitarian aid is a big part of our work, communications are also crucial to make sure that we're amplifying the people we support, so they are able to tell their own stories. It sounds ridiculous, but we need to constantly humanise what we’re seeing, especially against the other horrible narratives we're fighting.

Not everyone can be on the frontline. Our work couldn't happen without the mum doing the bake sale at school with her kids to raise money, or the people who come to our Choose Love pop-up shops, and buy a few things – our shops end up raising millions and millions, and are a key part of our charity. We have kids come in and spend their pocket money, and elderly people coming in to spend their fuel allowance, which they say they don't need, because they want to help. All of these cogs in the wheel are needed to make up a full ecosystem of humanity.

We started out as people just wanting to do something to help, then we found ourselves having a warehouse, then we found ourselves distributing aid, then we found ourselves working so closely with other organisations. Because we have an understanding of what it is to start an organisation from scratch, working with little resources, we know how to work with organisations that pop up like ours. We build our networks together.

Campaigning alongside Lord Dubs for the rights of unaccompanied children – on the Dubs amendment, and systems for unaccompanied children to be reunited with their families, and for children without families to be placed with foster carers – has been one of the highlights of my career and life. He's just amazing, and still going now in his 90s. To have come here on the Kindertransport and still be working for other people … he makes you realise that human beings can retain the power to do that.

The concept that one person is “legal” and another person is not is so ridiculous. Humanity, for me, is about seeing through all of that and seeing the truth that we are just all exactly the same. And if you haven't had to make a journey like lots of the people we work with, that's for one reason only – It's down to luck. We all have a collective responsibility to be there for our fellow humans. This bears repeating: we have more in common than what divides us.

Interview by Jude Rogers

10 Years of Choose Love - an evening of music, theatre, fundraising and community including performances by Jessie Ware, James Blake, Labrinth and Mabel, is at the Royal Albert Hall, London, Thursday 20 November. Tickets available here