Sheffield

A new storytelling group is inviting refugees and asylum seekers to learn how to tell stories. If that’s you, please go along to a one-day workshop at Sharrow Community Hall, John Street, off Bramwell Lane, on Friday June 18th.
A professional story teller will teach you how to perform your stories – truth or fiction – for an audience. You’ll then have an opportunity to do it in front of an audience as part of the Summer of Sanctuary celebrations.
The project will also produce a notice board with pictures and writing in English and community languages, a scrapbook and a visitor’s book, which will be available for display alongside performances and separately in community venues.

Students at Sheffield university are laying plans to improve refugee access to higher education. At a special meeting held in the Arts Tower the president-elect of the student union pledged his support for moves to assist refugees and asylum seekers who can’t afford to train or learn in the city.

The meeting heard from a Zimbabwean refugee who has been supported by the Refugee and Migrant Support Hub at the University of the West of England in Bristol. The unit helps refugees and migrants to access funding, employment and work placements, offers mentoring, pastoral support and much other assistance in overcoming obstacles to study and employment.

The national officer from Student Action for Refugees (STAR) told the meeting about their campaign lobbying for reduced fees for refugee and asylum seeking students.

Those present agreed to investigate the possibility of creating a support hub in Sheffield. STAR will work with City of Sanctuary to achieve this, starting with a public meeting at the start of the next academic year, this autumn.

A Doncaster/Iraqi/Kurdish asylum seeker has been spared a prison sentence by a judge who told the court he’d never heard such a testimony in his life.

Delshad, pictured, was in court because he’d been working as a welder although as an asylum seeker he is not allowed to take paid employment.

Through his barrister he explained his life story: his persecution and torture for being a communist in Iraq, harrassment of his family, his escape to the UK and seven years waiting for a decision on his claim for asylum.

During the long separation from his wife and family Delshad has worked voluntarily helping fellow asylum seekers and others in Doncaster where he has become a popular and well-known personality.

He took the welding job after years of living on vouchers so he could send money to his wife and family in Iraq, and use it to buy shoes, clothes, bus fares and beer for himself.

After hearing Delshad’s catalogue of mitigating circumstances the judge declared he was not going to send him to jail but instead passed a six month suspended sentence.

Candidates from the four main parties contesting the forthcoming general election attended a public meeting at Victoria Hall to explain their policies on asylum.

In the first meeting of its kind locally, Conservative Nicola Bates, Paul Blomfield (Labour), Jillian Creasey (Green) and Paul Scriven (Lib Dem) faced an audience of more than 200 who grilled them on their party’s policies.

The meeting was also addressed by a local asylum seeker and Julian Prior, chair of the team which produced the report ‘Asylum Matters’ for the Centre for Social Justice think tank run by former Tory leader Iain Duncan-Smith.