Refugee & Asylum Rights — November Update

October going into November has been an exciting month for #TeamTravel, where we’ve been getting lots of balls rolling! Following all of the amazing introduction and training sessions provided by Jess and other representatives from their charities, we were all super excited about getting stuck in with other people passionate about our issue. We walked away with loads of ideas after our initial brainstorm, now we are getting the support needed to figure out what is feasible and appropriate to aim for.

The highlight of the month was definitely getting to meet Melinda and others at the City of Sanctuary (CoS) HQ — our whole team is obsessed with Melinda and her work, she is such an inspiring and kind person to be working with, which just makes us feel even luckier to have this opportunity! Some of our team also got to join Melinda and CoS during the Sheffield SU Migrant Day of Action event, where they were running an interactive workshop to help people empathise with the reality of trying to live off £9 per day. Judging by the conversations of those taking part that weren’t involved in Change Lab or CoS, it made a real impact on those that weren’t aware of this issue, and was great at providing inspiration for our own potential Change Lab events.

Our initial focus for the next month will be to complete our induction training provided by City of Sanctuary, so that we can move onto bigger and better things; it seems our main focus for November will be networking and researching so when we are ready to start something we will have all of the resources we could need in order to help. We are also excited to send some of our team along on the ‘No to Hassockfield’ demo — demonstrations against the UKs largest women’s Immigration Detention Centre later on in the month — in order to meet others involved in fighting this issue, as well as to motivate our team by providing a more tangible experience next to all the research and training we will be doing otherwise!