Salford forum for refugees and people seeking asylum - about us

The seeds of Salford Forum for Refugees and People Seeking Asylum were planted in 2009 when Salford CVS came together with Community Pride Unit in order to explore the possibility of establishing a refugee and asylum seeker network in Salford.

During the autumn of 2009 Salford CVS delivered a series of workshops to all known refugee and asylum seeker groups in Salford. These workshops concentrated on identifying the ways in which these groups could be brought together so that they could support each other as a network.

Take Part Pathfinder programme offered a School of Participation to complement the work of CVS and provided accredited training for refugees and asylum seekers in Salford. Through this programme nine sessions were delivered at the Pendleton Gateway Centre and session elements were based on the needs and priorities identified by the participants. These included team building work, the forging of strong working relationships within the group, improving / developing listening, assertiveness and decision making skills etc.

During the School of Participation three key issues have been highlighted by the group

Hate crime.
The voucher scheme and the Azure Card.
The very poor standard of housing provided especially by private landlords.

As all the issues related in different ways to the housing providers the group organised meetings with the key providers to ask for their help and support in trying to improve the situation for asylum seekers in Salford. The meetings identified that the private providers had been out of the loop in Salford and were not connecting their clients to many sources of support and help in Salford. They were all confused about measures to tackle hate crime and did not seem to engage with the multi-agency working group. However, Salix Homes and City West had been very interested in the group and its work. The private providers had requested training from the police regarding hate crime.

The meetings organised by the group are listed below

Happy Homes.
Salix/City West.
UPM.
Priority Properties.
Manchester Refugee Support Network.
Police and housing providers to talk about training.

Under the umbrella of the network, three subgroups were also set up to further develop the network and to promote it in a wider area in Salford. These subgroups are as follows.