West End Refugee Service (WERS) is an organisation that since 1999 has been doing quite remarkable things under the radar on Tyneside. The registered charity provides support and opportunities to people seeking asylum and refugees and aims to help people regain control over their lives and rebuild a future here.
With a stated objective of: ‘Bringing about positive change to the lives of people whose futures have been irrevocably changed by past events in their home country’ – their efforts to counter the UK Government-led ‘Hostile Environment’ for those seeking sanctuary – cannot be overstated.
The dedicated team, operating from an unassuming building off Newcastle’s Liddle Road, are not only providing a welcoming place for people seeking asylum and refugees, but they are also working tirelessly to achieve positive change for their users, through the provision of direct support services, by creating opportunities for people to engage and thrive in their local communities and through work raising awareness and challenging injustices in the system.
One of the charity’s most inspirational projects, is their Skillsmatch programme - a platform that matches the skills, experiences and interests of people seeking asylum and refugees with a broad range of capacity-building volunteering opportunities in the Newcastle area. The project has been created and shaped with a group of asylum seekers and refugees at its heart.
The project represents a stepping stone to rebuilding an individual’s professional life in the UK and ultimately assisting in accessing employment. Just as crucially, the initiative is a way for those who have lived experience of the trauma most of us could not imagine – to build confidence, meet people and improve their English language skills – equally important steps to rebuilding their lives and taking back control of their future. The project has also been important for individuals who are waiting a decision on their asylum claim, during which time they are unable to work and have little to fill their time.
There are currently approximately 2,000 people in the North East who are seeking asylum, out of a total population of 2.6 Million.
Whilst individuals wait for a decision on whether they will be recognised as a refugee, they are known as an asylum seeker.
People seeking asylum do not have the same rights as refugees or British Citizens. Asylum seekers do not choose where they live. They are dispersed across the country and housed in asylum accommodation, often in homes of multiple occupancy. Whilst people are seeking asylum they cannot work. They cannot claim benefits, but instead receive a payment of £5.66 a day.
The Skillsmatch project headed up by Emma Ross, works closely with organisations to develop partnerships that enable individuals to contribute their skills to their local community and for these communities to increase their understanding around asylum issues. Central to the Skillsmatch project are opportunities for refugees and local people to spend time together, work alongside each other, learn from each other and build connections.
And one such collaboration is going from strength-to-strength at The Seven Bridges Café: A partnership between Dance City (the North East’s leading development organisation for dance, which exists to lead and support a thriving dance ecology in the region) and the West End Refugee Service (WERS),that is not only showcasing participants rich culinary contributions but also providing a platform for them to enhance existing skills and acquire new ones.
Alison Cheeseman is WERS Community Events and Fundraising Officer and ahead of our trip to the café, she explains the ethos:
“Seven Bridges is located within the Dance City building. They've always had a café but wanted to reinvent it – so talked with us about creating a low-cost, community cafe which is very nice - and very accessible. They want to serve beautiful food that's accessible for everybody.
“With our Skillsmatch programme, we match refugees up with local organisations and charities, and they go and work and gain new skills and also demonstrate their willingness to contribute economically to the UK. Several of our partners – like Seven Bridges, offer training and accreditation in areas including Food Hygiene, which obviously helps with CV building.
“They [the volunteers] do one day a week, because we just get so many people that want to go there. Placements usually last for 6 weeks.
“Quite excitingly, we're now talking to the Head Chef at Six [the iconic rooftop restaurant at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art on the Quayside]. He is keen for the possibility of the people that excel at the café to be able to go on and work at a MICHELIN level for a period too.
“Another very popular Skillsmatch opportunity is at Recyke Y'Bike, that has people donate old bikes, before the team clean and fix them for resale. There is also a Garden Project with the National Trust, at Wallington in Northumberland, which is awesome.”
Emma Ross is in no doubt about the massive positive impacts her project has on both participants and partner organisations:
“The people at the National Trust at Wallington are amazing. Our volunteers have been doing important ecological work – like creating habitat for Pine Marten.”
It’s clear that Emma is also taking a long-term and strategic view on reaching out to partners. Another element of her project that has the potential to deliver a real-world positive impact is a link-up with South Yorkshire based rail infrastructure company CAF Rail - who have been delivering a weekly employability programme for WERS users at Newcastle College. There are plans to build on initial successes with the creation of a Level Two programme soon. While corporate social responsibility is an essential element of any successful business toolkit, the flipside is this particular organisation are also able to identify members of a future workforce.
On arriving at The Seven Bridges Café, I’m struck by how welcoming and contemporary the feel of the place is. For the uninitiated a ‘community café’ might sound like it could be a slightly austere affair, with bland food and décor, but in the heart of the city’s central business district and as a base for the region’s ‘dance glitterati’ – it’s anything but.
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Catching up with political refugee ‘Harry’ (not his real name) – who is on shift today – it’s obvious the effect the project, place and people are having on him:
“Being here has made me more confident. Cooking your own local food, then coming here and learning to cook British food for a larger community, gave me that opportunity to learn what you guys eat and how you prepare it.
“You know what makes the places? It's the people. I have two great people back there [in the kitchen] teaching me. I started off with Ross [Project Co-ordinator/Head Chef] showing me how to prepare recipes and now I'm baking with Josie [Ross’s colleague].
“When I’m not here, I volunteer with another organisation called Crisis. I used to go there because when I finished college earlier this year I had a lot of time on my hands.
“I play football with WERS too, but my week is mostly helping out. I feel I'm home - away from home. Yeah, I think.”
Harry speaks with such eloquence and emotion about his experiences. I wonder if he is hopeful for the future.
“Hope - it's all I’ve got. I don't have anything else but hope. It might take some time and we understand the system has been overwhelmed by us [asylum seekers]. So I am patient. We just need to be patient with everything.”
And how important is it that organisations like West End Refugee Service and The Seven Bridges Café are doing what they’re doing?
“Ah, it's a lot. I'll talk about me - because I know me - I don't know about others. I know my experience. So, there's free SIM cards, with data [provided by WERS]. I remember the first time I learned about WERS. I was in Novotel hotel in Kingston Park. I walked for miles with screenshots of maps, because I didn’t have data. They gave me a new SIM. They have helped me so much.
“I have been privileged enough to even go to college. They've been so resourceful. When I run out of food, I go to them [WERS]. When I need advice on anything I go to them. They've opened my eyes to see what's really going on.”
Ross Sinclair is the new-in-post Project Manager and building a movement from the ground up at Seven Bridges:
“I took the job as the Head Chef/Kitchen Manager, but I've quickly realised that this job is more than just managing the kitchen. There's way more to it. It's such a big and exciting project.
“I think ‘one foot in the kitchen and one foot out’ is how I describe my new role. I became a chef through a love of being creative and because of my love of food and I've thoroughly enjoyed my time as a chef. But I've also got a strong sense of compassion for others and empathy and felt that there was something within me that I wasn't really being able to use [in a traditional kitchen role].
“The idea behind The Seven Bridges is to train the volunteers with relevant skills to go out into the world and help them find work once they have the right to work. But in my opinion, the most important work that we're actually doing is providing a space where they can feel valued and feel seen.
“I think as an individual, you see the change that needs to be made and you try to make it yourself. There’s a lack of community out there, I see that even in my personal life – on the street where I live. Why not help the person stood in front of you? I can't think of any reason why you wouldn't want to help someone.”
With a rhetorical question like that, it does sound as though Ross has found his groove:
“Absolutely. Spinning multiple plates at once is something I've become very good at, because that's all you do in the kitchen. There's so many things going on at the same time – but this is a slower pace than I've experienced elsewhere, which allows me to give the volunteers the time and the attention that they deserve.
“I think the eye-opener really has been the stories I’ve been told and the volunteer's own resilience. I’m touched how grateful they are to be volunteering. It's helping me in my personal life to be grateful of what I have. The role and the people are taking me on a journey with them.
“There are two minds involved here: there's me and there's Anand [Dance City’s CEO]. He is a bold thinker. He's a big thinker. He's a big-picture thinker. And he would have fifty of these cafés in the country. That's how big he sees this going. Because of the nature of the work I've done for years, I'm a very short-term thinker and I'm a detail thinker, so I focus on the day-to-day, the week-to-week, the month-to-month and that's as far as I look now, because I want to get the fundamentals right.
"My immediate ambition is to focus on the standards and the operation - and get it running as smooth as possible. But again, I think the real work is giving the volunteers a place where they can feel seen and valued and heard. The other stuff is absolutely going to help them in their life after this programme, it's going to help them get jobs – but valuing each other is my priority.”
Interrupting his lunchtime Mushroom Shawarma, Dance City CEO and visionary Anand Bhat shares some of his ‘big-picture thinking’:
“Dance City is quite an interesting place because we were born out of the idea of being the regional dance agency. Education is a driving principle of what we do. We have a public classes programme – and currently we've got about 25 genres of dance on offer. We're trying to increase that in the autumn as our numbers are doing okay.
“We work with ‘Talented and Gifted’ children aged 11 to 18, to access a means-tested bursary from DFE [Department for Education] to participate in a programme here, enabling them to get intensive training in dance.
“We have a Degree in Dance in partnership with Sunderland University. An engagement programme which stretches across the North East, so from Berwick to Hexham and to the coast - there is stuff that is mostly free at the point of use for the end user.
“We do some artist development work and also have a theatre here. We’re supported by Arts Council England, so there are some subsidised programmes for accessing our spaces.
“When this building was opened in 2005, there was a café included in the hope that it would just be part and parcel of the kind of work that we do here, but it didn’t work that way – and the Pandemic in 2020 was a seminal moment.
“I was aware how groups of people (who got no money) were organising themselves to help others. We started having conversations with potential partners and asked: Can we do something? There's a place over the road called the People's Kitchen, which is for the local community and operates seven days a week – but not on a Sunday night.”
After research to ensure there was no duplication of offer, Anand and a team of volunteers launched a Crowdfunding campaign to support those stuck at home with food security challenges during the pandemic.
“We thought we might raise £1500 and that would fund thirty meals over three months, but we actually raised £4,500 and we were able to deliver sixty meals over six months. When the January ’21 lockdown came, we were here cooking meals and there was a separate driving team that would deliver them to people’s homes.
“Through our volunteer contacts, we started a dialogue with the West End Refugee Service, which has been ongoing ever since - about what else we could do together."
As post-pandemic life returned to ‘normal’, the café again became a focus for the Dance City leadership team.
“We decided to put it out to a tender, seeking a community partner. One of the organisations that responded was WERS and they said: We have this track record of working with you in this way. Perhaps we can conceptualise something new? That was our preferred option and the project has been in gestation for almost two years. Working with refugees and asylum seekers comes with nuances and we’ve been able to facilitate that. That's where the social element really comes in.
“It's got to be either really great quality food - and that people come regardless, or that people are attracted by the mission. And what was pitched to us was a confluence of both things. Great food from all over the world, from the parts of the world that our clients are from, can contribute to our menu. They can be the people that cook the food, they can share that heritage and technique with the kitchen team – who in turn can learn.
“This venture serves a purpose for the people who are working and volunteering here. The people working here are learning new techniques from different parts of the world that they haven't experienced previously – and the volunteers here might be able to gain experience.
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“And for the customers here, I hope what they get is a real quality food offer. We operate in a paradox. The paradox being that it really matters who cooks the food. Because of where they're from, what they contribute, and how that narrative is in-keeping with our ethos, but at the same time, it doesn't matter at all, because it should be just about the food.
“We're really comfortable with that paradox, because if the quality of the food speaks for itself – people will come here regardless.
“We're just at the very beginning of this journey. Food is an experience that is best shared. It is joyous and when I think about how we do dance in this building - a lot of the stuff that we do is created from scratch: The choreographer will almost always work with a composer and a lighting designer to create - building a new product from scratch. We're trying to apply the same kind of principles to our food offer.
“The really important thing is the way that we serve two agendas, but with one founding principle - that it's about quality and it's done with love and that that's the common thing between the two.”
The Seven Bridges Cafe is open from 10am to 5pm - Monday to Friday
For more information about the work of West End Refugee Service, please CLICK HERE
For the very latest news from Dance City, please CLICK HERE
