We held our relaunch Nottingham City of Sanctuary meeting at the Awate Education Centre on Wednesday. It was a good night with representatives from Nottingham Arimathea Trust, Notts and Nottingham Refugee Forum, Nottingham University (staff and the student body), Nottingham Trent University and the Awate Education Centre as well as a number of sanctuary seekers.
As there are a lot of groups and organisations working to support refugees and asylum seekers in Nottingham, we will be concentrating on capacity building amongst the host community to make Nottingham a welcoming and safe place for refugees and asylum seekers with the eventual aim of the City Council becoming a City of Sanctuary and having this embedded in all their policies.
We split into groups to chat about the 3 steams we will be following for the time being – universities, schools and the arts. As there were people from both universities present and some sanctuary seekers wishing to go to university, the biggest group was the group discussing universities, with a smaller group discussing schools.
Judging from the noise in the room there were a lot of good conversations going on and friendships being made and re-kindled.
We’d like to extend our thanks to the Awate Education Centre, which was created to empower refugees, mainly from Eritrea but also all other refugees, to integrate into the community, for their generous hospitality and the delicious Eritrean coffee