Abigail applying for social justice award

The Centre for Social Justice Awards recognise and reward effective poverty fighting groups from across the UK .If you are a charity, small voluntary group, or other project tackling poverty in your local area and helping turn lives around, then they want to hear from you. You will be people focused, tackling causes as well as symptoms, practical, entrepreneurial, driven by conviction and motivated by compassion. Most importantly, whether a small organisation on a shoe string, or a larger organisation with robust funding streams, you will be helping people out of poverty and/or reversing social breakdown. Effective poverty fighting groups with or without charitable status are welcome to apply. Applications can be posted or emailed to arrive by 5pm on the 17 March 2009. For further information contact www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk

The Situation
Whilst individuals are within the asylum process they are provided with housing and subsistence level income by the Home Office. This ends abruptly once they are given a decision. If they are granted refugee status, individuals are given a maximum of 28 days to leave their Home Office housing and find somewhere else to live. Many people approach the Local Authority at this stage. Some are able to access the mainstream homeless hostels; others simply add their name to the long housing waiting lists. Many take the opportunity to leave the area to which they were dispersed to join relatives, friends or others from their national group in other parts of the county. Often the result is a long period of homelessness.

West Yorkshire has over 3,700 Home Office asylum seeker housing units and attracts many refugees from outside the area, far exceeding the housing supply.

Our Solution
Abigail Refugee Housing Project was set up in 2007, after consultations with the Local Authority Asylum & Immigration services and voluntary sector refugee support agencies. We offer two solutions:
The provision of good quality temporary housing in specialist shared refugee hostels.
A private lettings agency with provides longer term housing options to refugees. This is run as a social enterprise and surplus income is used to fund the housing support costs in our hostels.

The project recognises that social housing, including that run by the Local Authority and Housing Associations, is in very short supply and the private sector has the potential to provide significant numbers of housing units to assist with this unmet demand.

The project provides all of its residents (hostel and lettings) with housing support in the areas of access to benefits, health care, training and employment, and help to integrate into the local community. The project aims to ensure that every new referral has access to rent deposits, bedding, and adequate facilities / equipment to cook for themselves. We also want to be able to give accurate and realistic information to new customers about their housing options in their own language. This often means dealing with misinformation which has been provided by others and finding cost effective ways of presenting information in languages other then English.

In addition we provide housing management services to landlords and residents, including being the first point of call to deal with repairs.

The 2 main indicators for our success are:
That we can at least provide temporary accommodation to every homeless refugee who is referred to us.
That refugees are able to find suitable long term housing. This includes finding the right size and type of accommodation in an area where the refugee feels safe and has sufficient local knowledge.

We opened our first four refugee beds in December 2007. We then rapidly increased to 20 beds by July 2008. We now have 14 hostel beds and 18 lettings beds. We have accommodated 46 different individuals, of which 20 have moved on to independent accommodation.

Are you giving something up for Lent this year?

Chocolate... coffee... wine? Giving up small luxuries can be suprisingly difficult. Now imagine what it must be like to give up your home, your family, your country. Most asylum seekers and refugees are forced to give up everything they hold dear, while fleeing to safety.

A friend of mine decided to take the theme of sacrifice at Lent one step further by trying to not only give up a luxury, but provide for someone elses need. Normally she buys a capaccino everyday. She decided she would not only forfit this favorite morning treat, but also donate the money she saved (£1.40 each) to Abigail Housing. So by the end of lent she’ll have donated £56! Now her sacrifice will really help someone who has lost everything to poverty, war and insecurity.