Community Action For Refugees And Asylum Seekers

Programmes and activities We continue to offer a holistic programme that covers three key strands of support. These are: community and wellbeing, offered through our social groups; information, advice and guidance, offered through our casework service; and learning opportunities, bridging education, and skills building, offered through our learning team. Innovations continue within our programmes. New work on sports access for young people is making a real difference in their lives, helping them to boost their health and wellbeing, increasing their independence and widening their participation in new communities. Our learning and skills provision is going from strength to strength, with a new focus on employability that we are seeing have a great impact on people once they gain the right to work. And our casework team has forged ahead with developing an early access and move-on support model, ensuring that people receive as much information as early as possible, so that when they receive their status determination they are prepared and able to step forward into their futures. This work mitigates some of the extreme vulnerabilities people may otherwise face, including isolation, homelessness and protracted unemployment. Instead, we are seeing people develop strong communities of support, understanding their circumstances and making plans for themselves, and maintaining or developing skills that help them take the next step into education, training or employment. We are particularly proud of our employability work. We found that the employability program was hugely successful in its overarching aim to inspire our community members about their own skills, interests, and future goals. Our survey showed that 87% participants told us they feel better about the future, with 57% feeling ‘a lot better’. People at all different levels of their education and career experience told us how they felt more positively about their futures – they understood what options were available to them, were introduced to new opportunities they hadn’t thought were open to them, and they left with a renewed sense of confidence in their own skills. This was particularly noticeable for those in our community who had for a long time felt that further education and employment was out of reach. When hearing about community members’ positive experiences of volunteering during the intensive program, participants told us ‘it makes me feel hopeful, like there are opportunities out there for us’.