Students have been working with Sevenoaks Welcomes Refugees for the past few years as part of their service activities.
Students have been helping the charity with publicity and awareness by creating an easily accessible and informative website, which will point potential volunteers towards how to help and join and keep the local community informed. To go one step further, student have also created an Instagram account to keep updated on all the upcoming events. Students also helped raised the profile of their fundraiser YouTube concert on 27 June with Ayman Jarjour and Maya Youssef for which the charity raised over £3000.
Furthermore, they have also provided refugees with English conversation classes. Good English language skills are essential to enable the families to find work and integrate into the community, so helping the refugees become more fluent in English is a vital part of helping them succeed here. Before lock-down refugees attended regular conversation classes in school on Thursday afternoons. Now, despite some initial adjustments, these lessons have continued remotely. Similarly, another area of support we provided the refugees with is aimed to help them find employment. Finding a job without knowing the language and the area very well is difficult, so some have been helping with searching for suitable jobs, talking to potential employers, and writing CVs for the refugees.
Last year, students worked with some of the refugees in Sevenoaks to create and publish a fundraiser cookbook with authentic Syrian recipes: ‘A Taste of Home’. This year, they have continued to sell this cookbook with over 170 copies being distributed since September. In addition, they have decided to create a second volume that is vegetarian. This project has not only allowed them to raise awareness about this charity but it has also given helped to raise funds which will help resettle more refugees.
