Classes, Activities & Advice

Knowing our rights

We support our community to understand to understand their rights and entitlements through one-to-one casework and workshops, enabling participants to understand their rights and entitlements within immigration and asylum, housing, healthcare, education, benefits, and modern slavery protections.

Community-led advocacy

Our community members work on advocacy initiatives, which includes them training to become confident public speakers; creating protest materials; participating in demonstrations; and speaking out against harmful immigration policies and increasing far-right violence.

Our lived experience Advisory Board influences and shapes decision-making at West London Welcome, contributes to service delivery, and co-produces activities that meet the real needs of the community.

Our LGBTQ+ group meets throughout the year, building strength in shared identity and resistance to marginalisation.

Gathering evidence to challenge unjust systems

Our advice team coordinators systematically collect data, spotting emerging patterns in immigration and asylum policy and practice, and we regularly contribute evidence for legal challenges and to share with other organisations.

We bring our community members’ voices directly to local authorities and the Greater London Authority, working collaboratively and strategically with other organisations on homelessness solutions.

Reshaping public narratives about migration

We aim to shift public narratives. Our regular Humans of West London Welcome stories and two films communicate community members’ everyday realities. Our widely-shared media appearances include: the Guardian and BBC covering our work on refugee homelessness; the BBC and Guardian covering our Ethiopian pro cyclist community member; Independent and Daily Express on King Charles’s visit to our centre; BBC, ITV and New York Times on Afghan refugees we support; and the BBC on children’s experiences in asylum hotels. Our 2021 campaign highlighting the inadequacy of asylum hotel food created viral social media shares and coverage from most mainstream media outlets, leading to catering contractors changing their menus in local hotels and fresh vegetables appearing on the menu for the first time.

We combat misinformation and disinformation through our mythbusting initiative and seek to educate our supporters and readers through deep-dive reports on asylum origin countries. We work with council refugee teams to help them understand asylum issues, speak regularly at local schools and businesses, and collaborate extensively with the refugee sector to share knowledge and strategise on how to combat disinformation. We hold regular educational talks, and host guests including MPs, King Charles, and a wide range of people interested in our work and colloborating with us.