A party marking the end of our Gardens of Refuge project year with asylum-seekers and refugees. Plus 'Signs of Welcome': to be continued in 2018.

It's the end of the project year for our partnership with the CARAS team and the refugees and asylum-seekers they serve.

Of course we are going to do more all together in 2018, and we're planning that now.

Yesterday was the end-of-year CARAS Saturday Youth Club party, enjoyed by over 50 young people and volunteers. 

It was a high-energy afternoon with continuous home-made food to keep us going.

 Alongside the ping pong and games:

• we did more carpentry on the big pallet-table we're making for the Tooting Community garden
• we made lots of Christmas baubles as gifts
• we made over 20 macramé knotted hanging planters, using offcuts of T shirts as the strings. We were thrilled to have Tooting spider plants and tradescantia from Share Community garden.
• we finished the party with a gift game of choice and chance from the roll of the dice to select, give, and swap presents

The youth club is always a wonderful few hours when lots is offered and appreciated - all at the same time. 

So we're sharing photos mixed together, like the day itself. Its impact and welcome always feels much more than the sum of all the separate activities spread over 3 or 4 hours.

Signs of Welcome workshop

Late in November we had the opportunity to facilitate a workshop at the Museum Of London. CARAS is included in the fascinating exhibition called The City is Ours. It's on until 2nd January and all ages would enjoy the mix of imagination, facts and ideas about living in complex diverse city like London. It's well worth visiting!

November update on our 'Gardens of Refuge' refugee & asylum project partnership with CARAS

This time last year we were in the middle of the voting period for the Aviva Community Fund, where the Gardens of Refuge joint project with the Tooting charity CARAS won £10,000 - thanks to the votes of many friends near and far. 

This time last year...the voting was hot!

We're nearing the end of 2017's diverse activities with refugee and asylum-seeker beneficiaries. TTT has co-facilitated over 20 workshops in 2017 with the project...there's two more to go before Xmas.

Here's an update of activities since the summer - and a view forwards as we plan for 2018. We've included notes about each of these: 

1. Family Group
2. Youth Club for unaccompanied young people
3. Adults Group
4. Stay With Love exhibition
5. 2018 plans
6. Would you like to contribute?

1 Family Group
With the CARAS team we co-facilitated a Family Activity Day over October half term in the Hall at All Saints, Tooting. 50 people joined in to meet and reconnect, do some fun creative activities for all ages and enjoy lunch cooked by members of the group.

 











The big activity was carving pumpkins - and before that of course you have to get hands-on to scoop out the seeds. Any reluctance to get sticky hands was very quickly lost...in fact this stage became an activity of its own as hollowing-out took over and the children shared their new skills (none had ever done this before). Then: sketching and designing, cutting and admiring, collecting candles to take home: adults and children made short work of 20 pumpkins.

We created more Signs of Welcome:
 

These narrow strips of timber - some of them are the slats from discarded bed frames - are a design challenge where the artist develops what they want to say as a message, works out the fit, and paints directly or uses stencils. 


The arttist can also tidy up an earlier sign...so it's a collective project too.
Thanks Jeni, Nikki, Chuck, Hannah, Isabel and more.
We're going to continue creating 'Signs' in other workshops with adults and children. The Signs evolved as a combination of our Community Garden crop markers and the welcoming words in many languages that decorate the four pallet-benches made by the Youth Club in July.

Opening night of Stay With Love exhibition - we celebrated with poetry, music and good company!

On October 3rd the opening night of the Stay With Love exhibition at The Sound Lounge in Tooting saw a very diverse group of 75 join in to celebrate the exhibition. There were teenagers, families and young children from the asylum-seeking and refugee community who are served by CARAS. There were many of the CARAS team of staff and volunteers, and lots of TTT volunteers. All have been contributing to the creative and expressive work that makes up the exhibiton.
Plus there were friends old and new from the wider community - it was a great welcoming mix from many countries!

Carrie was our MC for the night. She welcomed everyone and reminded us that the offer to 'Stay With Love' had been written in July on one of the pallet-benches made in the Youth Club. That's a poignant invitation for a young refugee to make.
  
We saw the delightful CARAS Youth Club short film: two minutes capturing the experience of sharing and value that many of us have enjoyed as volunteers over the past two and a half years. We'll add a weblink asap.

Hannah White, co-founder of the Sound Lounge, celebrated the work and good humour of the young people from CARAS who are doing certificated training as coffee baristas and as sound engineers at the café.

We shared poems and prose linked to the experiences of living in and valuing a new place, of changing perceptions and of new languages and relationships. Here is a poem read and written  by Resina Chowdhury:

Prayer

To move away from a land

We must break ourselves off it completely. 

The split leaves a wound

a loss of memory, huge and gaping

which nothing material can fill. 

O Mother of a false birth, 

you were not ready for me. 

Where was the milk to offer your baby, all drained of blood? 

Dying, I was taken to where

the milk was plentiful

where there was blood to give, rich and warm

and we survived, 

more or less, weaned by another. 

But cannot forget those who held us before. 

What is the treatment for the loss of a culture? 

To see oneself continue in history? 

What can be said when the spirit is forgotten? 

When a life is not nurtured

because it is not understood? 

Still we seek out a tongue that will define. 

Mother

Teach me who I am. 

Give me knowledge to recover myself. 

Give me understanding to fill the loss. 

Give me strength to withstand hostility. 

Give me love to endure.  

We had live music of many kinds -

Dermot and Gerri led half an hour where the children 

used all the percussion instruments we could find. 

They were the backing band for extempore songs with words taken from some of the CARAS participants' statements about their heroes or ambitions.

David sang about Cristiano Ronaldo, Carrie sang

'I Want to Be a Dentist', Emiliano drummed...all fantastic!

Shonar Spiral from London played two gutsy songs.

Fadhil Alfadly and Kaspar King from Iraq rapped in Arabic over iPhone tracks and live drumming. One of the children stayed on to accompany their songs: she was very composed.

Dermot played a solo set as conversation continued until it was time to tidy up and head home after a lovely evening together.

Please visit The Sound Lounge and enjoy the exhibition any time the café is open. There are two interactive pieces alongside the wide range of creative work done by the Youth Club, the Family Groups and the ESOL classes.
There's a comments book set up, you can take a CARAS or TTT leaflet and please get in touch with CARAS or TTT if you want to know more, or if you want to find out how to volunteer. 
Please take a #StayWithLove sticker or two and ask your friends to visit!

The Stay With Love exhibition is open and ready to visit. You can add your own views to the show.

We're thrilled that the Stay With Love exhibition has moved from concept to reality alongside our partners CARAS and The Sound Lounge. We experienced so much energy, creativity and patience from all the volunteers and staff involved in this experiment: Thank You!

We hung the show on the 2nd October, and then the exhibition opening was brilliant last evening. Now the show is available to enjoy whenever The Sound Lounge is open, until October 29th.

Drilling holes for hanging

Suspending the figure drawings

Two of the exhibition pieces ask for your views and ideas. 
We hope you get there and add to When I Dream and Thread Your Story devised by CARAS and the adult group. Of course, you can enjoy the whole show with coffee or a sandwich served by young people from CARAS who are engaged in certificated work training at The Sound Lounge.

'Thread Your Story'

'When I Dream'

The exhibition opening festivities yesterday included an afternoon family crafts workshop and then the main evening celebration - we'll report on the celebration in the next blog post.

Afternoon Family Crafts
Straight from school, two dozen children & adults launched into an hour and a half's making, all crowded around two long tables. It was a great scene and we admired their energy after a whole day in school. We offered two of our favourite and valuable projects. Both are related to the purpose and content of the creative work we have carried out alongside the refugees and aslyum-seekers from CARAS over the past two years in the Rooting in Tooting and Gardens of Refuge projects

"Tooting's insects need your love!"
We looked at photos of some local garden insects (predators and prey; garden crop-friendly and also less desirable) and then made plastic bottle insect shelters for beneficial ladybirds and lacewings in the garden.
With some clever planning, decorations onto the rolled-up corrugated cardboard could be protected from rain by being placed inside the bottle rather than stuck on the outside of the plastic (= design and technology for real).
Families took their bottle-houses home to hang in the trees in their own gardens or neighbourhoods.

She's added a #StayWithLove sticker

"Feel safe and breathe!"
Secondly, we painted garden row markers with messages of welcome on them. That's in the same spirit the CARAS Youth Club showed when they wrote inviting comments in many languages on the on four inscribed pallet-benches for the Tooting Twirl - one is in the show and two more are being used in the cafe.

Children and adults devised messages - another design and planning challenge - which they painted on narrow wooden slats we've rescued from discarded bed frames - very neat recycling as the slats are strong and a perfect size. The artists donated all the painted markers to the Tooting Community Garden, which we really appreciate.

All the new markers, laid out on one of the benches

More soon on the evening opening celebrations....

'Stay With Love': Gardens of Refuge Project update

We're reporting back every six weeks on the Gardens of Refuge Project. That's our local project running throughout 2017 with refugees and asylum-seekers living in and nearby Tooting, alongside our project partners CARAS and The Grange.

Our previous summary at the end of May can be read here.
In June and July we've worked with the CARAS Saturday Youth Club. 

Elly Brown, MD at CARAS says:

"We've already witnessed the

transformations that take place

when people from far and wide

can use their skills and knowledge

to create something shared."

What have we been doing together?

'Stay with Love' Making instant pallet benches:

In one mighty 4-hour session, a loose and changing group from the CARAS Youth Club co-designed, shared ideas, problem solved and brought in new team members to make four of these pallet benches.

Hats off to that dedicated group whose pride meant they insisted on eating their communal lunch sitting on the new benches.

Part of the production line was to write messages of welcome and invitation on the seat backs. 

These are in many languages.

These young people have come to the UK in search of a welcome, safety and to put down new roots. It's poignant that they felt comfortable to contribute their own personal invitations so directly to all-comers.

Gardens of Refuge project: updating you on 4 fascinating strands at the end of May

We're sharing our monthly update about Gardens of Refuge.
Gardens of Refuge is our 2017 partnership project with CARAS and The Grange to provide therapeutic and positive experiences for people of refugee and asylum-seeking backgrounds who live in South-West London.
There are four interrelated project strands to share:
> Carpentry project with the Youth Club  
> Family Activity Days
> Vertical gardening with the Youth Club  
> A 4-day trip to The Grange in Norfolk 

1. Carpentry project with the Youth Club 
We've developed a relationship with a nearby primary school who need planters for their own outdoor space.

Led by Dermot, last weekend we began a series of 3 sessions to build and decorate these planters. The young people took on the design brief and modified the build based on other planters we have made together. In this case we're making beds that are low enough for young children to use, and also tough enough to stand up to inevitable playground clambering.

The session ran to twice its expected length because there was so much energy!
Later on we have access to laser-cutting equipment or 3D printing to make plaques to fix to the beds.



2. Family Activity Days
This half term we have helped facilitate the fourth Family Day of 2017 - partly social, partly to do an interesting activity, partly to join together for a meal (allowing for Ramadan).

Gardens of Refuge project. April '17 update on vertical strawberries and a watery ceiling mural

We're continuing to facilitate workshops as part of the Gardens of Refuge project with refugees and asylum-seekers who use the local services of CARAS in Tooting.

This is the project for which our partnership won funding from Aviva - via the public voting so many people joined last autumn.

The emphasis of Gardens of Refuge is on creating therapeutic experiences where participants feel happy and safe to explore imaginative activities together.

We're working alongide the CARAS team and volunteers with two groups:

• with the Saturday Youth Club (mostly unaccompanied teenagers) 
• and with Family Activity Days (adults and children in half terms and school holidays)

Here's the story from Gardens of Refuge in March and April:

Gardens of Refuge project - February 2017 monthly update as we start with a Family Activity Day

After the long haul of communicating near and far for voting in the Aviva Community Fund last year, winning funding in January, and getting on with the planning for 2017...we've begun the project!

Our first session with the CARAS refugee and asylum-seekers has been a Family Activity Day on Valentine's Day..
It was a familiar mother-and-children event like many repeated all across Britain when it's half term, and that everyday normalness was exactly the point: creating a safe and friendly space for some fun and practical family time together as a community.
That's the purpose of Gardens of Refuge: to create with asylum-seekers and refugees a therapeutic sense of wellbeing and feeling at home, plus growing activities and meeting members of the wider local community.

Run by CARAS staff and volunteers, plus more from TTT, by 11:30 the church hall at All Saints Tooting was transformed with friendly faces and drop-in games and toys for all ages.

Egle from CARAS ran a 90-minute programme while lunch was being prepared:

• In a circle of chairs: welcome, introductions & ground rules for inclusion and safety.
• In a big burst of energy - playing 'fruit salad' to get us all interacting, adults and children alike.
• At 3 tables: looking at images from the Tooting Community Garden and saying which kind of activities individuals would like to try out this year- gardening, picnicking & cooking on a fire; garden crafts; and enjoying nature. Everyone had 5 votes to distribute using sticky stars...results to be shared.

• Continuing at the tables to decorate flower pots using stickers, feathers and pipe cleaners.

Carefully writing a plant label

• Transplanting growing pots of supermarket herbs (donated by Waitrose Balham). Each pot was divided into 5 or 6 smaller pots, so the roots of basil, parsley, coriander, and greek basil have room to grow on windowsills back at home, and so they could all be shared out between 45 people.  

'Gardens of Refuge' project wins 2017 funding from the Aviva Community Fund

We are thrilled that Gardens of Refuge, the 2017 project working with Tooting refugees and asylum-seekers, has been awarded funding by Aviva. The project application was made by the local charity CARAS (Community Action for Refugees and Asylum-Seekers) and TTT are the partners along with The Grange respite centre in Norfolk.

Thank you for all your votes and support! 

Here's our vision for the Gardens of Refuge project: please click here to read

This funding award lets us look forward to a fascinating 2017, developing and delivering the new project and building on our learning and experience from our previous project together.  

We want to do some things that we know work well, and also some new things.


Plus we'll invite ideas (and resources) from the many well-wishers who voted for Gardens of Refuge last November.

A new feature that will add value is the new CARAS Youth Council. This governance group will help provide a voice for project beneficiaries in the youth club.
We'll also be working with other members of the CARAS community.

We all expect to learn and benefit. One of our first reactions, apart from joy at the award and making the project real, is that this award gives profile and visibility to the fact that refugees' lives matter, and that they have much to contribute in our shared communities.

We'll post more information on project plans as they develop.
Yes, we all worked hard to get to this stage, so it's great to have the affirmation from the Aviva Fund judges.
It took us a while to be sure on announcement day: students of communication will be interested that Aviva made the 'Project Winner' info available online and by twitter...and it was 24 hours before CARAS received a direct email saying 'You've won!'. By then we'd taken the public messages at face value and trusted that it was all true.

And there are some extra surprises - such as a reception at Parliament in late January where all the funded projects can meet each other and their constituency MPs.

We've worked since early 2015 with CARAS - that was on the 'Rooting in Tooting' project, supported by the Royal Horticultural Society's 'Greening Grey Britain' campaign and by Sir Walter St John's Educational Charity - more info here. That project brought new volunteers to CARAS & TTT; we're really delighted with that.

Thanks again for all your interest and support - 

this is a very motivating start to the New Year!

Gardens of Refuge: yes we are through to the finals of the Aviva Community Fund!

Brilliant success at the voting stage: Aviva Community Fund has just confirmed that we're through to the finals for the Gardens of Refuge project! 

 

We now do some further application steps by December 7th, and then there's judging and then the results are announced January 10th '17.

Great news & thanks for all the support!

 

To see the project description, click here: https://goo.gl/y6b66Y

First feedback after voting closed Friday 18th on Gardens of Refuge via Aviva Community Fund

We're proud to share where we reached when voting closed yesterday on the Gardens of Refuge campaign with CARAS.   
Over 600 people supported the project online.
We believe we came THIRD, with over 6200 votes. 
WHICH IS WONDERFUL!

Our formal ranking will be confirmed on 22nd Nov by Aviva & we'll communicate wider after then. 

If we're in the top 4 in our project category, we go through to the next round - to a more familiar bid process.

By the way votes went from 3400 on Weds morning to 6200 by lunchtime yesterday!

Thanks for your votes, patience and energy in this period of repeated messages and nudges in every medium possible, dominating the TTT airwaves.



Normal service can soon be resumed on communicating the rest of TTT's rolling projects.

Every vote really did count!

Please vote by 12:00 Friday November 18th for 'Gardens of Refuge' project funding from Aviva

This week is the home straight for voting online for funding support for Gardens of Refuge at the Aviva Community Fund. It will come down to our tally of votes at the end of 18th November, and of course the other 'Aviva projects' are also doing a push this week.

Please vote by Friday 12:00 for Gardens of Refuge, and ask your family and friends to vote too. Together we can support this creative and forward-looking Tooting partnership project with the refugee and asylum-seeker community centred on the Tooting charity CARAS.
Every Vote Counts, and every vote is appreciated!

How to vote?
You have to register individually before you can vote. To register, please click here for the Aviva webpage
Then search for CARAS or Gardens of Refuge to vote!

Project Details:
Read the description of the project online here.

For the future: bulbs for 2017

You'll see that the project is all about growing the therapeutic benefits of gardening plus greening the community we share in Tooting.
And it's about building ways to enable refugees to share their own knowledge and skills locally.
Together we'll imagine and create a more beautiful neighbourhood as a legacy for all.

Legacy: flourishing from 2015's cuttings

There are three partners in Gardens of Refuge:

CARAS - with whom we have worked in depth for 18 months on Rooting in Tooting.

The Grange - a residential respite and permaculture centre in Norfolk who work with CARAS. Please see The Grange.

& Transition Town Tooting


 Thank you so much for your support & please vote by 12:00 on 18th Nov!

'Gardens of Refuge': our new partnership project for 2017 with CARAS & The Grange. Vote for funding online through the Aviva Community Fund!

“To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.” (Audrey Hepburn)

We are thrilled that Gardens of Refuge, our new partnership project plan has reached the final public voting stage of the Aviva Community Fund! The project is centred on the refugee and asylum-seeker community who are supported by the Tooting charity CARAS.

Read the description of the project online here.

For the future: bulbs for 2017

Gardens of Refuge is listed under 'CARAS' on the Aviva Community Fund website.
You'll see that the project is all about growing the therapeutic benefits of gardening plus greening the community we share in Tooting.  
And it's about building ways to enable refugees to share their knowledge and skills locally to imagine and create a more beautiful neighbourhood as a legacy for all.

Legacy: flourishing from 2015's cuttings

There are three partners in Gardens of Refuge:

CARAS - with whom we have worked in depth for 18 months  on Rooting in Tooting.

The Grange - a residential respite and permaculture centre in Norfolk who work with CARAS. Please see The Grange.

& Transition Town Tooting

As of today, the website is live for the public to vote for the projects they would like Aviva to support. 
Voting is open until 18th November: but please don't delay!
Please vote and encourage Aviva to support Gardens of Refuge!  

You have to register individually before you can vote: to register, please click here for the Aviva webpage
Then search for CARAS or Gardens of Refuge to vote!

Thank you so much for your support, 

and please contact us by email if you have any queries.