We are influencing practice by building the knowledge and skills of front line workers

We deliver training to front line staff and students to help them gain empathetic understanding and insight into specific challenges refugees and asylum seekers face around:

• family resilience
• safety
• mental health 
• healthy living
• arriving as UASC (unaccompanied asylum seeking child)

Training is delivered by our members who draw from their lived experience, that of the community they support, and the collective experience shared by all members. We support members to develop the training content and resources and to build their skills and confidence as presenters.

Sessions help workers see common humanity behind the bureaucratic labels of ‘asylum seeker’ and ‘refugee’ and to imagine themselves ‘in their shoes’. And we share what works in supporting the refugee and asylum seeker community, from their own perspective.

We customise our training to suit particular professional roles and post-graduate and undergraduate courses. We train teams delivering social work, early help, adult social care, nursing, mental health, crisis intervention, policing and community safety and we provide briefings for charitable foundation grant managers. They most often describe our training as ‘transformative’ and ‘thought provoking’.

Our training is now part of several Workforce Development programmes and the teaching syllabus for undergraduate and post-graduate University courses. Our members have also joined University admissions panels to candidate selection processes. 

Feedback from trainees demonstrates how these sessions can positively affect the way they view, engage with and support the RAS community. They say

• ‘I’ve never heard first hand experiences like this before, so it was really eye-opening’
• ‘I didn’t know how much I didn’t know!’
• ‘I’ve gained new insights’ 
• ‘It opened my mind’

Contact us if you would like to discuss training for your team

Please contact info@refugeevoices.org.uk .  We are happy to customise our training to match the role your team plays in the lives of the refugee and asylum seeker community.

We can deliver sessions both face to face and online.

Our Programmes