Migrants, the media and the message

6 October 2011

A conference for those working with migrants and wishing to engage with the media and give migrants a voice.

* Thursday 6 October 2011, 11am-5pm

* Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund Offices, County Hall, Westminster Bridge Road, London SE1 7PB

Programme includes:

* The launch of an online media toolkit

* A showcase of the work carried out by project partners

* Workshops

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FOOTNOTE

Organised by the EPIM Migrants & Media Project partners. A more detailed programme will be issued shortly. This event is free, but booking is essential. To register, email: [email protected] (mailto: [email protected]) by no later than 3 October 2011.

Access to healthcare for migrants

A conference to highlight experiences in providing migrant communities with health services.

* Friday 23 September 2011, 9.30-5pm

* Stratford Circus, Theatre Square, Stratford, London E15 1BX

Speakers include:

* Dr Ike Anya – Consultant in Public Health Medicine

* Dr Yusef Azad – Director of Policy and Campaigns at the NAT

* Dr Kambiz Boomla – Clinical Senior Lecturer

* Dr Angela Burnett – GP at the City and Hackney Sanctuary Practice

* Paul Corrigan – Former Director of Strategy and Commissioning for NHS London

* Marie Gabriel – Chair of NHS East London & City

* Dr Paramjit Gill – RCGP Clinical Champion of Social Inclusion

* Adam Hundt – Solicitor at Pierce Glynn Solicitors

* Dr Hiranthi Jayaweera – Senior Researcher at COMPAS

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FOOTNOTE

Hosted by the Migrants’ Rights Network (http://www.migrantsrights.org.uk/), please see the websites below to see cost of attending.

> RELATED LINKS

Access to Universal Health Care in the Age of Migration (http://health4migrants.info/)

Migrants’ Rights Network (http://www.migrantsrights.org.uk/)

NATECLA conference and exhibition 2011

The National Association for Teaching English and other Community Languages to Adults (NATECLA) conference and exhibition 2011 for ESOL practitioners 8-10 July, University of Coventry, Warwick

The conference runs from 4pm Friday 8th July until after lunch on Sunday 10th July. A programme of presentations and workshops for ESOL teachers, managers, organisers teacher trainers and researchers, plus the opportunity for networking, accessing the resources exhibition and hearing about the latest developments in the sector.

Please follow this link for more information about the programme and to register:

http://www.natecla.org.uk/news_details.asp?NewsID=556.

The early booking rate is available until 3 May.

Welcoming refugees, opposing indefinite detention

Though much of the media focus on the issues of asylum seekers and refugees (as well as migration more generally) is filtered through a prism of fear and the instinct to exclude, the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) – whose 8-10 April 2011 annual delegate conference I am attending – continues to work hard for fair reporting and justice.

At a well-attended NUJ fringe meeting today, we heard moving and disturbing stories from three journalists seeking asylum: Charles Atangana, Alieu Ceesay and James Fallah-Williams.

Full story

Working in Partnership to Reduce Inequalities across Leicestershire

Refugee Council conference agenda confirmed – 23 March 2011

The morning session of the conference will focus on the work of five refugee organisations from around the UK who have developed and delivered inspiring projects for the benefit of refugees and asylum seekers in their local communities. Participants include RAMFEL, NILE African Development Organisation, Manchester Refugee Support Network, Churches Together Network and the Gateway protection programme. This will be followed by a panel discussion. Following the networking lunch, where delegates are invited to bring literature for display on the information stand, delegates will hear from the Keynote Speaker Roland Schilling, UNHCR Representative in London. This will be followed by a question and answer session to discuss challenges facing the sector and how to work more effectively together to protect refugees and asylum seekers. The panel will comprise Donna Covey, Chief Executive, Refugee Council, Roland Schilling, and Mike Kaye, Advocacy Manager, Still Human Still Here.

Please follow this link to book a place on the conference: http://www.refugeecouncil.org.uk/Resources/Refugee%20Council/downloads/eventsAndtraining/Conference%202011%20booking%20form.doc?dm_i=I6P,D3L0,31R5LZ,11A6G,1

Get Up! Stand Up!

By Colin Prescod

Colin Prescod, the IRR’s chair, addresses the sixth Huntley Archives conference ‘Get Up! Stand Up!’

This year’s conference centres on struggles for Black community in Britain, waged over three decades, from the 1960s to the 1980s.

For Caribbeans, in particular, these local UK struggles were at first part and parcel of a broader politics of liberation and freedom – anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist, and therefore anti-racist. The campaign slogans of the time were militant. And that militancy inflected our poetry and song. ‘Get up, stand up!’ urged poet-musician Peter Tosh. The mood was insurrectionary. The most radical of us aspired to establishing our own non-exploitative, non-capitalist, democratic ‘bespoke’ socialisms, back home. Cuba’s was a very Caribbean revolution.

Eventually, as migrants began to put down roots in the UK, there was a turn to ‘here to stay, here to fight’ struggles. For a relatively brief moment, maybe a decade and a half, alongside other migrant-settlers with colonial pasts – from the Indian sub-continent and from continental Africa – we forged the idea of ‘Black’ not as a label for skin colour but as a political colour: the colour of resistance to all race and class injustices.

We fought back against insults and physical attacks in public places, as well as against being reduced, in effect, to a second-class citizenship. These struggles were about belonging – about the right to have full and fair access to citizens’ rights, and about the conditions on which we were prepared to belong. We were going to have to change this place, if we were to live here in a dignified way. And given that the existing systems and institutions were not geared to the kind of liberation we aspired to, a further tenet of these early campaign struggles was the centrality of ’self-help’ strategies.

We demonstrated and protested loudly about inequalities in schooling, housing, healthcare, law enforcement, and policing – and at the very same time, we set up our own community supplementary schools and social and legal advice centres. We objected to political disenfranchisement and exclusion – and at the same time we formed our own political orgnisations and campaigns, some liberal, some revolutionary. We railed against the whiting out of our part of the story, in relation to the official versions of British history – and at the same time, by religious as well as secular routes, we set up any number of organisations and events devoted to de-colonising our minds. We raged about ill-informed media reporting, as well as the about the absence of properly researched literature on the Black experience, contemporary and historical – and at the same time we encouraged scholarship and new writing by and about Black experience, and we established newspapers and magazines, as well as publishing houses and specialist book-shops. Of all these things the Huntley Archives speak volumes – because Jessica and Eric Huntley were initiators and participants on the frontline of the entire spread of these campaigns.

Back then, campaign struggles supported resistance and nurtured rebellion. This was the burden of our tradition – from invasion and capture, to transportation, to plantation enslavement and indenture, to colony, and now to migration and settlement in Britain. The full weight of all this history culminated in explosive street rebellions, peppering the period from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. The summer of 1981 marked the apogee – when there were riots, simultaneously, in more than thirty UK towns and cities.

The establishment cracked. We were offered anti-racist and equal opportunities legislation, of a sort. Some of us were even recruited to join the untransformed mainstream. We also witnessed a multitude of multi-culturist and diversity policy initiatives.

And yet, in October 2010, some three decades after that summer of 1981, the state’s very own Equality and Human Rights Commission report revealed the facts that today in the UK proportionately more young Black men are incarcerated than in the USA; that Black youth (2-3 per cent of the population) are fifteen times more likely to be stopped and searched than their white counterparts; and that Black Caribbean and Pakistani babies are twice as likely as white babies to die in their first year. This is devastating evidence of the persistence of race and class discrimination, aggravated now by a rampant ‘Islamophobia’.

Back in the day, we resisted imaginatively and rebelled courageously to some effect, but we did not make a revolution. We won significant anti-racist battles, but we did not win the war against racism.

This conference is asking a question of our ‘now’. We need to do more than just reminisce about some glorious past age.

HAT News is precluded from expressing a corporate view: any opinions expressed are therefore those of the authors.

Smile National Conference 2011

A one-day event Thursday 10 February 2011 – Birmingham Council House

This event will enable you to learn about the educational needs of separated refugee children and young people. You will also learn more about SMILE’s proven practice model and the reasons behind its success, identified through their action research. The event will also be an opportunity for you to learn about SMILE’s research findings as the report will be launched on the day.

The full day conference will include a keynote speech by Dr. Maggie Atkinson, Children’s Commissioner for England, and excellent networking opportunities, as well as the opportunity to hear from SMILE mentors and mentees.

It will also include high quality professional development opportunities as there will be running 3 workshops on the following three topics:

1. Setting up and running a Mentoring Project for Refugee Children
2. Inclusive Education for Refugee Children
3. Age Assessments and Age Disputes

You will also have the opportunity to see the energising and inspiring work by Refugee Youth who will be running an interactive and thought provoking event.

Finally you will be able to watch the SMILE documentary films, made by young people about their lives and experiences.

Who should attend?

School and College staff
Refugee Community Organisations
Members of refugee forums
Voluntary and community sector organisations involved in supporting the education and well-being of refugee children and young people
Voluntary and community sector organisations interested in setting up services for refugee children and young people
Local authority education services
Social workers and keyworkers
Foster Carers and foster care agencies
Local strategic partnerships

If you would like to join in celebrating 3 years of success, please book as soon as possible to avoid disappointment as places at this event are limited.

Lunch will be provided. To register please return the attached booking form to:

SMILE Conference,
Children’s Section,
Refugee Council,
240-250 Ferndale Road,
London SW9 8BB

Or email at: [email protected] .

For more information call the SMILE Team on 020 7346 6783 or 020 7346 1116

Download SMILE National Conference – Flyer

Download SMILE National Conference Booking Form

Doctors of the World conference

Not of their choosing!

By Margaret Taylor

Imagine having to run from your home with half an hour’s notice – taking only one small bag – leaving your identity documents, familiar keepsakes, family, friends – all that makes home home.  Unimaginable!  Yet imagine it we must if we are to show Christian love and compassion towards those fellow human beings who have had just this terrible experience.

Three of us went to a conference which helped us to imagine what leaving home in this way might be like.  We were each given a brief description of a character and asked to imagine what we might do if we were that person in that situation.  I was given the role of a young Iraqi electrician, accused by the Americans of being in league with the insurgents; and by the militia of collaborating with the Americans.  Neither would listen to his denials.  The militia were on their way to kill him.  To save his life he had to leave immediately.  Others had different characters but all with one thing in common – to save their lives they had to flee at a moment’s notice, leaving everything behind to seek asylum in some strange land.

Through role-play, testimonies of asylum seekers and facts, we were made sharply aware of the pain suffered – grief for the life, things and people left behind!  That grief was made worse by fear of an uncertain future, further exacerbated by a sense of helplessness. To escape they had to put themselves in the hands of agents who took their money but gave them no choice about where they would end up after what was often a long and horrendous journey.
When they arrived, the trauma didn’t end.  They were caught in a bureaucratic system which failed to allow for the confusing effect of what had happened and their total unfamiliarity with the surroundings in which they found themselves.  Those who had power to determine their future seemed to treat them as statistics not as human beings.

The conference stirred in me a profound sense of grief for the pain suffered by these fellow human beings.  I also felt shame that my country could condone and even sometimes share in the unfeeling and uncaring treatment they received from the United Kingdom Border Agency – I thought we were better than that.  I was left with a sense of helplessness – how can we change things for the better?

We in the Peace and Justice Group will be looking for what we can do, however little in the way of practical action, lobbying locally and persuading multi-national corporations to do away with those practices which tend to support oppressive regimes.

Please pray for us and for asylum seekers and the UK Border Agency and support us as much as you can.

* This article was first published by Loughborough United Reformed Church in The Link October 2010*

Watch you tube Videos below:

Interview with Jonathan Ellis (Refugee Council)

Interview with Gabriela Quevedo (ICAR)

Passage Roadshow & Beyond Borders Interview (Lucy Purves)

Asylum Psychology (Nimisha Patel)

Dreamers Project (Andrew Lake)

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