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Hearing The Unheard Workshop – “the best day out of the office this year!”

Hearing The Unheard Workshop – “the best day out of the office this year!”

The Swansea City of Sanctuary team hosted a day-long workshop on Friday September 25th.
The event titled, Hearing The Unheard: How you and your organisation can encourage the voices of people seeking sanctuary, attracted over fifty attendees from various organisations looking to learn more about supporting and involving people seeking sanctuary.

We were delighted to see lots of new faces including attendees from Hay, Brecon & Talgarth, as well as Pembrokeshire.
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The event included presentations about The Sanctuary Speakers, The UK’s First ever Shop of Sanctuary and Cardiff City of Sanctuary’s LGBT Asylum Seeker & Refugee Support Group. The event was split into two halves- the morning which focused on innovative methods of encouraging the voices of people seeking sanctuary. This session included workshops on poetry from Hafan Books, Cardiff’s Refugee & Asylum Seekers Advocacy Forum, and Oasis Cardiff’s Digital Storytelling project.

The focus of the afternoon changed to sharing best practice and ideas for turning an organisation’s pledge into achievable actions which support and include people seeking sanctuary. This included workshops from The African Community Centre’s Amani Project, and from the Swansea City of Sanctuary Management Committee, about pledging and how organisations and individuals can be involved.

Following the workshop, The Taliesin Arts Centre hosted the opening night of Nine Lives. This play focuses on the life of an LGBT asylum seeker, performed and directed by the West Yorkshire Playhouse.

We really enjoyed the day and want to thank all our presenters and workshop facilitators for their hard work. We also want to thank everyone who spent the day with us and hope you found the time you spent with us, useful and valuable. We look forward to working with as many of you as possible in the near future.

We’d like to leave you with some quotes from the event’s evaluation forms:
“Very proud of City of Sanctuary.”
“This was the best day out of the office I’ve had this year. I learned loads & made lots of contacts for future work. Thank you.”

If you were unable to attend the event, but want to know more about what happened, search for the #HearingTheUnheard hash tag via social media.