I would like to make you all aware that the UKBA is trawling our web sites in order to frustrate some of our attempts to help asylum seekers.

I recently received a letter from Damian Green, Minister for Immigration, through my MP, Keith Vaz. I am a member of the group that ran the Leicester City of Sanctuary voucher exchange scheme. Like other similar groups, we can no longer exchange supermarket gift cards for asylum seekers because of the recent UKBA directive that forbids supermarkets to sell them to Azure card holders. We wanted to explain to Damian Green some of the hardships that enforced cashlessness brings, to justify our scheme and to ask him to overturn UKBAs restriction on the use of Azure cards. We were not hopeful of success but felt we had to try.

The response we received was a typical politician’s reply, it told us nothing that we did not already know and did not address any of the issues we had raised. What WAS interesting, however, was the explicit statement that UKBA had learnt about voucher exchange schemes through information they had found on the web, notably about Sheffield’s ASSIST scheme and projects run by Cities of Sanctuary.

I feel this is a warning and that we should be careful about any information we put in the public domain that would enable the UKBA to think up yet more ways of making life difficult for asylum seekers. It is, I know, difficult to balance the desire to share examples of good (and perfectly legal) practice with the desire not to give UKBA any additional ammunition. I should be interested in your comments.

City of Sanctuary groups all over the UK have begun a tradition of organising launch events to announce their movement to the wider community and get the broadest possible range of people on board at an early stage.

Some of the experience of how to make these events successful, creative and fun have been collected in the City of Sanctuary handbook. There are also some fantastic ideas to be borrowed from the Transition movement – a network of community-based initiatives for local resilience and sustainability.

Local Transition initiatives often hold events they call an ‘unleashing’, and there is a stirring description of the recent unleashing of Transition Malvern Hills on Rob Hopkins’ blog here, which included three choirs, a film, two cellos, several children and a magician!

As Parliament 'washes up' outstanding business before the general election campaign gets under way on Monday, MPs have just a few days left to add their names to Early Day Motions. These are a vehicle for members to express an opinion and draw attention to issues such as EDM 1224 which highlights the effects of incarcerating children at Yarlswood Detention Centre. That motion was posted a week ago and has attracted just four signatures. An earlier one, EDM 890 expressing "concern at the low level of support for asylum seekers" has been signed by 43 MPs in its six weeks of life.
Anyone wanting to check up on their MP's record can do so here

One of the major benefits of working for City of Sanctuary is the range of things you get to be involved in. We aim to make towns and cities more welcoming towards people seeking sanctuary, and (within reason) there’s no limits on how we do it. Local groups are given complete freedom to decide what methods they want to use to further the cause in their locality, which has resulted in a number of creative and innovative ideas.

However, there is one big restriction on all our groups, and that’s resources. City of Sanctuary will never have boundless funds, so we need to utilise the best value methods we can, and take advantage of low cost or free options to the full.

Internet and communications technology has changed a lot in the last few years, with a steady stream of new innovations with differing uses and characteristics. What they have in common is that they tend to be cheap or free, and they tend to be social, and this makes them potentially vital tools for an organisation like ours.

Now there are clearly a lot of different types of social interaction, as there are lots of different types of people, so inevitably there are many different types of social media, each of which allows people to interact in a different way. The design of each particular site is optimised to allow and encourage the type of interaction which characterises it as a particular form. The resulting structure of these sites makes them far more suitable for some uses than others. I’ll try and explain this through the example of a problem we faced recently.

When I joined, City of Sanctuary already had a Facebook group. The movement had started just as the whole social media phenomenon was itself starting to gather pace, and the decentralised, open nature of the site seemed suited to the movement’s ethos and likely to prove a useful tool in expanding our reach and recruitment.

This is an extract from interviews with a Karen refugee family from Burma, who came to Sheffield from a refugee camp in Thailand, as featured in the documentary film Moving to Mars.

The Say family arrived in the Darnall area of Sheffield in November 2007 and have never moved from this property. They did not have very good luck with their children; two of them died in the refugee camps and after a few months of being in the UK they got the news that their grandson, who was two years old, had died in the refugee camp. The family had experienced fighting many times, even though they were in a Thai refugee camp. None of them speak English.

Mrs Say: “When we arrived in Sheffield I was so afraid to cross the road in this big city. I did not want to go out or let my daughter to go out either, I’m really scared of being lost.”

Mr Say: “I have now learned English for two years already but it is too difficult for me. My wife and I never went to school in Burma. I learn and I forget it the next day.
I want to work but I cannot get any jobs. I hope the UK government will create non English-speaking jobs for our fellow Karen who do not speak English like me.”

Mrs Say: “I like the UK life, I do not need to pack my emergency bag any more. We are now free from the Burmese and Thai Soldiers torturing. I was scared to death when [my husband] told me about the Thai soldiers beating some of the men in the Karen refugee camp, because they went to look for vegetables in the Thai farmers’ farms.”

Mrs Say: “When we were in the camp, one night the Thai soldiers played with fireworks. We did not know that they were playing with them, we thought the Burmese soldiers were shooting into our camp. Then we grabbed our emergency basket and went to hide in the jungle. I thought that problem had stopped, but after 15 months of living in this property the troubles began. First, they threw stones at our window, pulled out our dustbin and poured out all the litter in front of our house.”

Mr Say: “I was peeking through the window and I saw many young people walking on the road. They tried to set fire to our dustbin but the fire did not start. The next day we went to collect all the litter and put it back in the bin, that night my brother-in-law who is English and my sister visited me from London. I asked him for help. I thought he might call the police, but he told me that if I called the police, the gang will do it more later. As none of us speak English he said we’d better keep it quiet.

The daughter: “I know one of them, he lives at the back of our back garden. He walks into our garden lots of times. Even though we close the garden door he still walks into it because we do not have the key for our gates.
I never play in my garden any more, I’m so scared of him. When we were in London, we were told that in this country some people try to catch children and sell them to other countries. Now I only play with my friends in my house.

The Doh family came to Sheffield two years ago from a Burmese refugee camp in Thailand. The couple has four kids. When they were in Thailand they were never allowed to leave the camp, which was guarded by the Thai border military army. The family is settled in Firth Park.

Mrs. Doh: “I like my neighbours a lot. They never give our family any problems. My children are very noisy, like the way children are, but they never complain about us. On Eid day they even brought us their food for my family.”

Mr. Doh: “We live in this property nearly two years. We do not get any dirty looks from any one. My house is in the middle, and both of them are very kind. Sometimes when I did not have time to pull out my bin they did it for me and when I see they did not take out theirs I did the same to them as well.
The other two neighbors are single. They see my kids play outside their house but never say anything.
I sometimes come home very late in the evening, I am not afraid of anything – ‘Fear will have to call me King’.” (Their own expression.)

The second daughter: “Daddy, did you remember when we first moved in, they brought us some toys, plates, spoons and their clothes?”

The little boy: “They were too big, they fit you but none of their clothes fit me.”

The elder daughter: “Mum cooked for that Aunty’s birthday meal last year. She likes my mum’s cooking.”

Mrs. Doh: “I do not want to move out from here. I know my neighbors and it’s very easy for me to get all my food from the Pakistanis shops, we can get everything from the shops.”

A new series starts on BBC4 on Wednesday (February 10th, 9pm) chronicling the lives of youngsters in an Arab school. Directed by Sarah Hamilton, who recently made a DVD about City of Sanctuary, it focuses on four schools in the Syrian city of Damascus.

Sarah says she was given unique access to film the youngsters over the course of a year to explore what it’s like to grow up in the heart of the Arab world. “Using the prism of school life,” she says, “the series takes us beyond politics and media cliches to the stories of ordinary people.”

These include boys who dream of playing for Manchester United, girls who write poetry, and refugees who tell their stories through rap.

What does the word “home” mean to you?

“Home is not just four walls or the country we were born in.
It is not a locked door, an investment, a legal address,
or a nation with rigid borders. Home is where the heart is:
a yearning for a precious past, a dream of something that has never been, or a present reality. Home is in relationship – with our
families, in community, and with the whole of creation.
The qualities of home are reflected in the circle (O),
an ancient symbol for safety, equality, inclusiveness, and eternity.
But we will never be at home unless we are at home to ourselves.
Home is where we all want to be.”

This is from my recently published book, The O of Home. There is, of course, a great deal about borders and belonging – and displacement and detention – as well as a mention of City of Sanctuary. I’m doing a number of events, including today at Eastside Books, Brick Lane, East London. The format is one that might work elsewhere: a panel of refugees and,in this case, migrants, discussing what home means to them. I’m happy to facilitate such events elsewhere, if fares are paid. See the website for details of more UK events etc.

I hope you will feel able to circulate details of the book. I am happy to send flyers to display, if requested.

www.o-of-home.co.uk

www.o-books.com

Jennifer Kavanagh,
London City of Sanctuary

A reflection for the Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony in Sheffield, 27th January

Last year I was at a ceremony to mark the 70th anniversary of the Kindertransport, a voluntary effort that rescued thousands of Jewish children from the Holocaust by offering them sanctuary in the homes of British people.

For me it was an overwhelming experience to meet so many elderly people, some of them still with German accents, who had come to Britain as small children, saved from the concentration camps by ordinary British people.

Several of the survivors on that day spoke about their sorrow at having to leave their parents behind, because the British government had refused to accept them, so most of them were murdered. Because at that time there was no international agreement to offer protection to people in need of sanctuary, and no country would offer to take them in.

The United Nations Refugee Convention was created in 1951, to make sure that the world would never shut its doors again. The Refugee Convention gave people facing persecution the legal right to claim sanctuary in a safe country. It is part of the legacy of hope from the Holocaust and it is a precious achievement.

But the right to sanctuary is now under threat. Over the last decade in this country people seeking sanctuary have been scapegoated and demonised. Our newspapers have stirred up hatred and resentment against them. Our politicians have created laws specifically to target them, so that people seeking sanctuary are routinely made destitute without the right to work, refused health care, arrested at dawn and detained indefinitely without charge, including over 1000 children held in British detention centres every year.

I’ve just been reading ‘The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations’, which is a ‘business’ book that contains some interesting lessons for the City of Sanctuary movement. The basic argument is that decentralised, non-hierarchical and non-bureaucratic organisations (‘starfish’) can have significant advantages over traditional institutional forms, in which power and resources are concentrated at the centre of the organisation (‘spiders’).

City of Sanctuary immediately struck me as a clear example of a ‘starfish’ model, which includes the following features:

It is decentralised – each local City of Sanctuary group is independent and free to make its own decisions, plan its own activities, and have control over its own resources. Groups are mutually accountable, so that key decisions affecting the whole movement are made by local group representatives at national network meetings, rather than a separate managing body.

It is based on a shared vision – City of Sanctuary groups share a vision of building and celebrating a culture of hospitality for people seeking sanctuary. It is this shared vision and ethos (summed up in our core principles) that gives the movement its identity, rather than a legal or administrative structure.

It is flexible and adaptive – there is no single, centrally administered ‘plan’ for the City of Sanctuary movement as a whole. Instead, each group is free to experiment, to develop new ideas, and to explore new directions. This means that the movement is in constant ‘research & development’, and can respond quickly to changing circumstances or opportunities.