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Our work to make refugees welcome is worth celebrating
Our recent UK Housing Award was fantastic, but what we’re really proud of is our work supporting refugees, writes Matthew Foreman
Awards and accolades are fantastic things to achieve.
They impress boards and demonstrate to staff involved that their work is considered important, that it is appreciated and, perhaps most importantly, that it matters.
We entered several projects into the UK Housing Awards, confident in our abilities and hopeful our peers would approve, but aware that we had stiff competition in every area and that the UK housing sector as a whole is delivering a huge amount of quality work.
When the big night rolled around, we were of course thrilled to win one of our categories, best supported housing landlord, for our work supporting refugees across our city. We immediately took to Twitter to start bragging and started thinking about how soon this badge of honour could be displayed on our email footers and the like.
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But, in the aftermath, I started to think about the bigger picture. What it really meant for our important work to be celebrated in this way.
And, actually, the impact there would be if we suddenly couldn’t deliver it.
Following the recent Refugee Week, I’d like to invite all Inside Housing readers to reflect on the importance of the services we all provide.
As Ban Ki-moon said: “Refugees are people like anyone else, like you and me. They led ordinary lives before becoming displaced, and their biggest dream is to be able to live normally again. Let us recall our common humanity, celebrate tolerance and diversity and open our hearts to refugees everywhere.”
Sometimes, in the rush of juggling several things at once and trying to keep up with the relentless churn of tasks that working in housing can generate, it’s easy to forget the fundamental difference we can make. The winning of this award brought this into sharp focus for me.
The theme for this year’s Refugee Week was “You, me and those who came before”.
It’s pitched by the national organisers as “an invitation to explore the lives of refugees – and those who have welcomed them – throughout the generations”.
We’ve been welcoming refugees here in Newcastle for more than 25 years. The city has had City of Sanctuary status since 2014 and, in 2015, the Home Office invited Newcastle City Council to become a trailblazer local authority, welcoming the first cohort of arrivals under the Syrian Vulnerable Person Resettlement Scheme.
Newcastle has had a significant increased number of asylum dispersals in recent years. We’re also supporting unaccompanied minors and are working towards UNICEF Child Friendly City status.
All our families are sustaining tenancies, and we’re supporting them to integrate into their communities. We meet every new arrival from the airport and take them to their new property, where beds are ready made, the fridge is stocked, and it already looks like a home.
In addition to expected support such as providing homes, and organising healthcare and education, we offer a holistic range of support options which recognise that there is more to ‘living normally’ than taking care of the basics.
“Most importantly, though, we have hundreds of refugees living free from fear in comfortable accommodation, safe in the luxurious position of being able to take for granted everything we all do, no matter how ‘ordinary’, and providing a great platform so they can achieve the extraordinary”
We give guided neighbourhood tours to identify places of worship, leisure venues and appropriate food stores. We focus on helping refugees to preserve their culture via local networks and work with community organisations to increase social engagement. We encourage access to sporting venues, libraries, the arts and specific health services.
We also go beyond the terms of our contract by proactively supporting newly granted refugees into council tenancies – we don’t receive money for this, but we do it because it’s the right thing to do.
And we must be doing something right – we’ve provided training to three local authorities, at their request, and they are now taking part in the resettlement scheme.
Many of our refugees are thriving in their new environment. We have children who have learned to be fluent in English in a matter of months (the resultant Geordie twang is a necessary gift when it works that quickly!) and fathers who act as unofficial guides to other new arrivals, often beating our team to the neighbourhood tour.
Most importantly, though, we have hundreds of refugees living free from fear in comfortable accommodation, safe in the luxurious position of being able to take for granted everything we all do, no matter how ‘ordinary’, and providing a great platform so they can achieve the extraordinary.
I certainly think that’s worth celebrating.
Matthew Foreman, customer services director, Your Homes Newcastle
