Refugee Week 17-23 June – Spotlight on Refugees Welcome

Refugee Week is the world’s largest arts and culture festival celebrating the contributions, creativity and resilience of refugees and people seeking sanctuary. This year’s theme is ‘Our Home.’

This Refugee Week we’d like to highlight the incredible work done by Refugees Welcome, a project that has been in existence for nearly 9 years, and has blossomed during that time to be the very embodiment of a warm welcome for refugees.

Refugees Welcome Cheshire East first emerged in response to the Syrian war, when Syrian people were seeking refuge and living in camps in neighbouring Lebanon. The British government agreed to take a number of vulnerable families under the VPRS (Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme), with five families arriving in Cheshire East in 2017. Since then families have also been resettled from Afghanistan under a separate scheme, further Syrian families have made Cheshire East their home and more recently a large number of Ukrainian refugees have also arrived since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

With a volunteer team of around 50, supported by 8 trustees, Refugees Welcome run conversation cafés, ESOL classes, and work directly with refugee families to help them orientate and settle into the community.

Refugees Welcome work alongside the council’s Communities’ Team and local voluntary and faith groups to ensure families are supported and empowered to flourish. Through their commitment and passion, many people who’ve lived through the trauma of leaving everything they know and hold dear have been helped to find safety and community in Cheshire East.

How can you help?

Refugees Welcome would welcome more volunteers and trustees. They are currently looking for a volunteer who would like to work on the next edition of their newsletter Boundless. They are also in search of a new trustee with fundraising skills.

Interested? Please contact them through their website.

You can also support the work of Refugees Welcome by making a regular monthly donation.

This will go directly towards:

• Supporting ESOL training for all the refugees who need it.
• Insurance for volunteers working with families
• Professional help to select, train, deploy and oversee volunteers.
• One-off needs – for example extra equipment required when a family sets up home.

For more about Refugee Week, including Simple Acts you can take to spread the message of welcome to refugees, see: Refugee Week – 17 – 23 June 2024