How support enables young refugees and asylum seekers in Kent to enjoy themselves during the summer holidays
We all imagine summer holidays to be fun, but if you are an unaccompanied child seeking asylum, with no friends and no money, a trip into the countryside can become rather daunting.
Yorks Hill Farm Camps (YHFC) is a Kent-based organisation that offers free weekend-long countryside holiday camps to unaccompanied children seeking asylum to offer them a fun and safe way to enjoy themselves during the school holidays whilst learning about the UK’s country life and wildlife.
The weekends include art, craft, natural history, music, and cross-cultural team activities at the local adventure centre. Sports activities include swimming, football and a rope course.
YHFC started as a grassroots community project to extend authentic countryside hospitality to refugee families.
Since February 2008, YHFC has been working with the Basis Project Organisational Development Officer for the South East, Beatriz Fernandez. They decided that their priorities were to update their procedures and polices to ensure the best possible care for the young people and also to fundraise from trusts and foundations in order to run two camps and a festival. This would mean that they could increase the number of young asylum seekers who would benefit each year from 16 to at least 140.
Fundraising
Before 2008 YHFC relied on personal donations from volunteers, management committee members and local people to run the camps. This year, due to the increasing demand from young asylum seekers to attend, YHFC sought funding from trusts and foundations.
Their first application was sent to the Camelot Foundation. YHFC wrote this application with the help of another local organisation, Kent Refugee Action Network.
Later on, with support from Beatriz Fernandez, YHFC successfully secured funding from two other grant schemes: Awards for All and Cooperative Community Fund.
The funding allowed them to run:
- Two weekend camps - one at Yorks Hill Farm (24 refugees and 20 volunteers) and the other one at Windy Ridge Farm (16 refugees and 14 volunteers).
- A one-day kite festival on farm land in Kent/E. Sussex, featuring Afghan kite flying and other aspects of Afghan culture hosting 70 young refugees/refugee families supported by seven volunteers.
“Our fundraising team set out to secure grants with no previous experience and a little late in the year,” explains Michelle Rose, YHFC volunteer-coordinator. “The Basis Project was a fantastic and responsive support to us throughout the time when we were under pressure to get applications complete and submitted.
“We were delighted with our outcomes – three out of five applications succeeded and all our planned activities funded. I am sure we would not have achieved this without Beatriz supporting us, and we might have been more limited in our ambitions for the group’s funding and activities.”
Policies and procedures
In the last six months YHFC has been working hard to develop the policies and procedures that help them to safeguard the young people attending the camps. Besides the rigorous Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) checks that all volunteers have to undertake, YHFC has developed a procedure for young people to report any incidents. Whilst making volunteers aware of the organisations child protection policy and a guidance procedure to ensure that the young people are safe.
Michelle Rose says: “The organisation has been supported structurally… stabilising the voluntary group with the correct policies and paperwork in place to allow the group to grow. Help from the Basis Project made it easy to be sure we were doing everything by the book.”
