CARAS Refugee Week Celebrations:
For Refugee Week 2020 CARAS launched the above video “Hold On To Your Hope”. It’s a beautiful piece of drama art written and performed by some of our talented youth group members, with the support of our amazing partners Protection Approaches, Phosphoros Theatre, and People’s Palace Projects. It’s a letter created online on Zoom on what it’s like to be a young refugee living in the UK. You can watch this amazing piece of work on our YOUTUBE CHANNEL
Refugee Week is an important opportunity to provide for asylum seekers and refugees to be seen, listened to, and valued. The theme of Refugee Week 2020 is ‘Imagine’ because when things feel stuck when the old ways of doing things are no longer working, that’s what we need to do.
This Refugee Week we were supported by the performance poet Megan Beech who worked hard to pull a digital show fundraiser together. It features her own song with Nick Clarke and music from Ren Harvieu, Romeo from The Magic Numbers, China Bears, Gecko, Ganda Boys, Nina Fine, Morgan Bosman, Birds and Beasts, Naomi Larrson, Steph Foyle, Ella McCafferty Wright and poems from Jess Green and Jaspreet Kaur.
We thank all those who donated their talents and time to this stunning show, you can enjoy the show HERE
CARAS AGM:
We met for our AGM on Tuesday 23rd June 2020 on Zoom. Meeting online didn’t dampen enthusiasm – in fact, the AGM had a record attendance of 41 people including beneficiaries from all our areas of work, volunteers, trustees, staff, and donors. We looked back on an astonishing year of change, and forward to the next one where we hope we will continue to be creative, flexible, and able to be together some of the time.
During the AGM we formally welcomed two new trustees, Katie Burgess and Rishi Goenka. We also said farewell to two long-standing trustees. Haidi Jenkin has served as Secretary for over four years and brought ambition, rigorous logic, and great mentoring skills to the team. We also said farewell to Jess Thomas, one of our founders and longest member of CARAS. Jess began informal volunteer schemes with refugees in south London more than 18 years ago. Her insight, drive, and constant awareness of social justice led to the creation of CARAS as it is today. We thank Jess and Haidi enormously for all that they have given us.
And For The Future:
We are carefully working out our plans for the future, considering the possibility of very small gatherings outside during the summer. We will be maintaining our online offer for the majority of our work, recognising that a significant amount of extremely valuable work is being delivered through this. For now, we are still not able to safely offer group work in the way that we used to, even with the easing of lockdown as our project spaces do not allow us to follow adequate distancing measures. We’re working on changing this and hope to be seeing everyone in person again soon.