NEWS & BLOG

During West London Welcome’s early days of feel-good community building, members of our community would mention incredibly worrying details of their lives. They couldn’t find a legal aid lawyer to advise them about their complex asylum case; they had been trafficked but hadn’t felt able to tell anyone before; they were going to become homeless tomorrow. When trying to signpost people with these significant challenges for support elsewhere, we quickly learnt quite how at capacity the casework services of other refugee charities often were, and how exhausted people were trying to find help. We soon developed our own in-house advice, casework and advocacy expertise to address the needs of the people in our community.

Today, West London Welcome opens four days a week, with 10 staff and 135 volunteers providing holistic support for 300 people weekly from 70 different countries. We offer everything from English classes and casework to hot food, a foodbank, advocacy, social and creative activities, essential practical items, and childcare for parents taking classes. We provide intensive immigration, housing and benefits casework, and find lawyers to take on asylum and public law cases.

We know from our years of work that we can’t address the practical and advice-based needs of a person without accounting for their social, emotional and playful needs at the same time. It’s incredibly challenging for people to get through an hour of recounting to a caseworker their past experiences of being violently exploited, but this feels more possible with the knowledge that there’s a welcoming table full of friends and hot food waiting once the meeting has finished. The strength of a supportive group enables people who are considering giving up on life completely to keep going.

We believe that our work with people who have experienced significant trauma must happen in person in a homely place in which people feel safe, alongside others with similar past experiences with whom they can bond over time. Community comes in myriad forms these days, but for us, it’s something that can only authentically emerge through the careful, deliberate work of bringing people together every week over many weeks, months or years.

Many refugee, asylum-seeking and migrant community members volunteer to help run the centre, organising food, donations, cooking and translation, and playing an advisory role to help staff make decisions about the charity’s activities. Feeling you belong somewhere, in a place where everyone knows your name, enables genuine trust and shared joy in a way that was once common in free community spaces around the country before so many were lost through years of government cuts. In some ways, what we are doing – gathering together regardless of our differences – is as old as time, but it feels precious.

The trust built within our community provides the foundation for us to push for change. We gather evidence of the challenges and injustices facing community members through our casework and the simple act of asking about someone’s week. We understand the lives of people in our neighbourhoods in the context of the immigration system, and can organically and quickly spot patterns that concern us. Over the past eight years, we’ve provided evidence to the mayor of London’s team, local government and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), and worked strategically with other non-governmental organisations for change.

We submit evidence to law firms as part of legal challenges, from the case of the Home Office’s mass seizure of phones and data extraction at the border, which the High Court ruled unlawful, to the deeply inadequate state of asylum accommodation for families with young children and the unlawful detention of asylum-seeking people at the Home Office’s Manston camp. Some community members have opted to become claimants for such challenges. This evidence and the relentless hard work of lawyers and other advocates enable access to justice for refugees and asylum-seeking people around the country. Frontline organisations like ours, and law firms and advocates enabling those they represent to hold power to account, need one another in the pursuit of justice, dignity and respect for migrants.

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Leyla Williams is Deputy Director of West London Welcome.