We are thrilled to announce the launch of the HOME? Heritage Project website alongside our animation and toolkit.

Partner organisations have already organised screenings and launches throughout February. Global Link in Lancaster and Dragons Voice in Manchester launches were well attended by the local community members and other organisations. Attendees were engaged, informed, and enlightened by the issues highlighted in the animation and toolkit. Some audience members expressed that they gained a deeper understanding of the migrant experience and the valuable contributions made by migrant communities in the UK. 

Additionally, the majority felt they had ideas to effect positive change within their communities based on the insights gained. One audience member commented on how to create employment networks.

The Home? Heritage project is funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and started back in May ’22. Working in partnership with the following vital organisations who offer crucial support – GLOBAL LINK in Lancaster, MAP in Middlesbrough, LASSN in Leeds, DRAGONS VOICE in Manchester, REFUGEE WOMEN’S CONNECT in Liverpool, and NACCOM who are a national organisation who supported us with the creation of the toolkit. We worked across Northern England, collecting and curating the lived experiences of migrants (including refugees, people seeking asylum, and other migrants) living in Northern England during the last 10 years.

The animation and the toolkit is designed to assist groups in listening to the stories of lived experience of people who have come to the UK in the last 10 years and promote discussion about how we can help people arriving in the UK feel at home. In listening to the stories, we can gain a better understanding of the challenges that displaced people living in the UK face and this understanding will deepen, helping empathy and compassion to grow.

We hope that these resources will support schools, youth groups, community groups, informal education projects, charities, local councils, and other organisations to work with lived experience stories that focus on recent contemporary migration to the UK. Helping to foster a culture of compassion and understanding to counteract the culture of the ‘hostile environment’.

The next and final stage of the project will be the Co-Evaluation Workshop that we will be holding on 18th March 2024. This will be attended by our 5 organisation partners and some of the participants who took part in the project. As a substantial part of the workshop, we would like to carry out some Ripple Effect Mapping. This is an interactive, group evaluation method that encourages people to think about the consequences, effects, and outcomes from a social change project – intended and unintended, big and small.

The HOME? heritage project funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund has been focusing on the collection, curation, and dissemination of lived experiences of migrants (including refugees, people seeking asylum and other migrants) living in Northern England over the last 10 years. 

In August we pulled together the feedback gathered from the 5 Knowledge Exchanges in the 5 areas during Refugee Week in June and the Pan Northern Knowledge exchange in July in Liverpool. We are now collating the feedback to create roadmaps/action plans for each area including an overarching one for the North of England.

A total of 117 people attended the Knowledge Exchanges and people in each of the areas had the opportunity to hear people’s oral histories about their lived experiences of coming to live in the UK. 

The Knowledge Exchanges gave the wider community the opportunity to learn about this heritage, provoke discussion around the issues and people came up with ideas to input into a local road map/action plan that will help to – 

• disseminate the learning.
• create actions that help people to develop compassion and understanding. 

People said the event had inspired them to “get more involved”, “pay more attention”, “speak out more” and given them greater awareness. One expressed an intention to start volunteering. People demonstrated a shift in attitudes. One response described how they would “talk to people more positively about new migrants”, while another stated they would “be more aware of the importance to make people more aware of the similarities we share with asylum seekers, why they come and should not be a competition for resources, housing or jobs”. Another answer described how the event had left them feeling “more excited to be positive and keep working hard to adapt to life as a newcomer in the UK”. These responses show a positive personal impact on some of the attendees of the events.

The main key ideas that came up from the Knowledge Exchanges are:

• Campaigning for better rights for Migrants, Refugees, and asylum seekers – this includes the right to work, better housing, better financial help, better health support and more legal support.
• Connecting support services together more effectively.
• The need for specific trauma informed mental health support.
• Creating more activities for people to combat social isolation, especially for young men.
• Better targeted health care support for women.
• More ESOL support.

The feedback from the Knowledge Exchanges and the roadmaps will inform project resources that are being produced now, in phase 4 of the project, which is focusing on Widening Impact by producing –

• an educational toolkit – this will be a resource pack for organisations and individuals to use.
• a website – the stories, newspaper database and toolkit will be available from the website.
• a local newspaper story archive/database
• an animation – which will also be part of the toolkit and screened across the 5 areas in early 2024.

During each Knowledge Exchange there was also the opportunity for people to sign up to get involved with the project and many people have signed up. In response to this we are currently planning more Community Reporting training, Archive Research Training and Train the Trainers training that will happen from Oct through to March.

During Refugee Week in June (19 – 23) there will be significant events across the North of England where the personal stories of migrants and refugees living in the UK will be heard.

The stories have been collected as part of a Heritage Lottery project running in the North of England. The project is managed by Peoples Voice Media and aims to preserve and archive current stories of migration to the UK over the past 10 years.  From these stories there will be the creation of; an educational toolkit, a database of local new articles and an animation, to share with communities so people can gain a better understanding of the current position of migrants and refugees. These resources will give communities the tools to help to build communities of sanctuary.

Peoples Voice Media have been working with Refugee Women Connect in Liverpool, LASSN in Leeds, Global Link in Lancaster, Dragons Voice in Manchester, MAP in Middlesbrough and using peer-to-peer Community Reporting have gathered lived experience stories as well as undertaking archive research and collected local newspaper stories from the past 10 years. 

There will be 5 in-person events in each area Lancaster, Middlesbrough, Leeds, Liverpool, and Manchester to look at the stories gathered during Community Reporting workshops, as well as reviewing key themes from the archive research activities.

The aim of these events is to bring people together from each area; members of the wider local community, cultural and heritage organisations, to explore the findings of the workshops and research. The events seek to open-up a dialogue between different local people about the heritage of migration in their area, how that relates to their current thinking and perceptions and what can be done to better understand, learn from and preserve this type of heritage in the future.

The theme of refugee Week this year is compassion, and this certainly resonates with some of the stories we have heard from participants on the project who have found the British people very welcoming.

“I’m very happy because we met here very nice people, very kind people.’ Karina, Lancaster.

If you’d like to find out more, please reserve your free space by completing the Eventbrite booking forms below:

Monday 19th June: 12:00pm to 3:00pm – Lancaster

Tuesday 20th June: 12:00pm to 3:00pm – Middlesbrough

Wednesdav 21st June: 12:00pm to 3:00pm – Leeds

Thursday 22nd June: 12:00pm to 3:00pm – Liverpool

Friday 23rd June: 12:00pm to 3:00pm – Manchester

Or get in touch with Kath Peters at People Voice Media at kath@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk

International Child Health Group (ICHG) are looking for organisations working with refugee and asylum-seeking young people to collaborate with them to produce a short film to celebrate Refugee Week in June.

ICHG are producing a short film showcasing community led art projects involving refugee, migrant, asylum-seeking children and their families, sharing reflections on their dreams.

ICHG see the film as a means of denouncing anti-migrant racism, hostile rhetoric and policy and hope it will build solidarity among health professionals, VCSE groups and the public to resist and challenge harmful and unjust policy.

They’re are asking organisations to invite the children, young people and families they work with to draw, paint and create art pieces reflecting on their hopes, wishes & dreams. Each piece should also be accompanied by a written description explaining their ideas.

ICHG are asking that organisations then email a photo of each piece of artwork and its description to minpinamy2@gmail.com by Monday the 15th May.

The images will be included in a two minute film with possible animation of some of the artwork. They hope this will humanise people seeking sanctuary, give platform to the voices of children and young people and challenge the narrative around forced migration. The film will be available to share on social media platforms in time for Refugee Week (19th June). In advance of this they would send participating organisations a copy of the film for review and if you are happy with the product they can include your logo.

If you’d like to get involved – get in touch with them via the email listed above!

We are working on a new and exciting 2 year project called Home? – a project made possible by the Heritage Fund, that focuses on the recent lived experiences of migrants in Northern England. Through Community Reporter stories and Archive Research, we will be exploring what it is and has been like to migrate to Northern England over the past 10 years.

On this project, we will be gathering 100 stories to document authentic lived experiences, looking at how people have settled in (or not) to their new homes, how migrant communities have contributed to the places they now live and much more. Through the stories and archive research we want to give a platform to the diversity of voices that make-up communities across Northern England and explore our very recent heritage – making sure it is preserved for future generations. We will also be embedding a social justice and anti-racist agenda into this work.

These stories will then be showcased in the public arena at a variety of venues such as Museums, Libraries, Schools, Colleges, Universities and we will be creating an animation to bring the key messages from the stories together, as well as a toolkit that will offer guidance in exploring migration in community and informal learning settings. 

To achieve all of this we are not working alone and have partnered up with some great folk to help us bring this vision to life. Specifically, in Northern England we are working with: 

• Refugee Women Connect, Liverpool 
• Global Link Development Education Centre, Lancaster
• Leeds Asylum Seekers’ Support Network, Leeds 
• Methodist Asylum Project (“MAP”,) Middlesbrough
• Dragons Voice, Greater Manchester

These local partners will help connect the project and us into communities and engage different people in the heritage activities.

And on a national level we are working with NACCOM – a national network of over 140 frontline organisations and charities across the UK, working together to end destitution amongst people seeking asylum, refugees and other migrants who aren’t able to access to public funds because of their immigration status. NACCOM will be helping us to create the toolkit and tie in the issues and debates from the stories and research into national level conversations.

Stay tuned for more updates!