Cheshire, Halton & Warrington Race & Equality Centre has been around since 1995. Our aims are to eliminate discrimination, especially race discrimination and to promote equality of opportunity and good relations.
Part of our work involves supporting local BAME communities, addressing any inequalities they experience and fighting for racial justice. In 2016 we became involved in the Syrian Resettlement Programme, providing English classes and wrap around support for families. During that time we also saw an increasing number of asylum seekers coming to our general English classes asking for support and help. The lack of any specific refugee organisation within our patch meant that we were the natural place to take on support for these emerging communities.
We started an asylum seeker drop in during the pandemic, when we became aware of how many asylum seekers were essentially trapped in initial accomodation, awaiting a decision from the Home Office on their cases. We quickly realised how desperate many people were - most had no winter clothing and they had no money to pay for hygiene products to keep them safe. So we started then to give out clothing and hygiene bags which included masks, sanitizers and wipes. They then started attending our ESOL classes, but as we were restricted on numbers we decided to run a seperate class for them after drop in.
None of our work with asylum seekers is funded and we are purely reliant on donations and good will to keep services running.
