NEWS & BLOG
16 June, 2021 - By Leyla Williams
Refugee Week: Celebrating with our asylum-seeking neighbours
This week for Refugee Week we’re celebrating every day with community activities in the sunshine with our asylum-seeking neighbours in temporary hotel accommodation. Our community events are vital ways for people to make new friends, get support from us, and have fun.
Our Outreach Coordinator Mehri has been out and about coordinating picnics, and we loved having a visit from Councillor Rebecca Harvey, Lead Member for Child Refugees in Hammersmith and Fulham.
It’s been so inspiring to see local people across West London develop communities around different Home Office hotels with such joy, warmth and energy over the past few months. We have a large concentration of these hotels in the Hammersmith and Fulham, Kensington and Chelsea, and Hounslow boroughs, and the asylum-seeking families and individuals living there are incredibly isolated and surviving on very little or no money at all. People have been able to make their first friends in the UK and access food, healthcare and legal aid. The support of these pop-up communities have been a real lifeline for people, and demonstrate the possibilities of what neighbourhoods can achieve together.
