MRCF launches new website to mark Refugee Week!

Welcome to the brand new MRCF website! It has been a long journey for us and I hope you will agree that it was worth it. Organisations such as ours are immersed in the day to day support of individuals and communities and we find it hard to record and share our experiences and expertise with the rest of the world. At MRCF most of the time we feel left out of the public debate on migration and integration. Our voices tend to be ignored and neglected; yet we are a small army of committed volunteers and community leaders who work on a daily basis on the success story that is cosmopolitan London.
More than a year ago we decided that this state of affairs needed to change. Determined to tell our story we started a process of changing the way we work and so here we are. This change would not have been possible without support from the Carnegie UK trust and the help and guidance we received through their power action research project.
Once we had set our course we were successful in securing funding from the Equalities and Human Rights Commission to help us with the costs of claiming our bit of digital space.
More importantly, in addition to this new interactive multimedia website, the Commission is supporting our digital access training for community leaders. This training will help us build capacity for the digital age amongst disadvantaged communities and provide them with tools to give voice to their concerns in a public debate that so often misrepresents them and has an adverse impact on their lives.
We are opening our door into the digital universe to mark the start of Refugee Week – a series of events celebrating sanctuary and marking the anniversary of the 1951 Convention on Refugees, an important landmark in the development of humanity.
Please join us in this celebration and more importantly join us in a balanced, factual and rational debate on migration.

One thought on “MRCF launches new website to mark Refugee Week!

  • Tom Strachan says:

    Great news on securing funding for this digital initiative. I have been lucky enough to be part of the first digital access training course and can say whole heartedly how helpful it has been in understanding the importance of web-based communications in today’s media landscape. Your statement that the aim behind this strategy is to ‘build capacity for the digital age amongst disadvantaged communities and provide them with tools to give voice to their concerns in a public debate’ is a very important and often neglected issue, subtle as it is in comparison to the stark legal problems facing refugess and migrants in the UK. It could even be said to be a question of social health. The idea of training community leaders who in turn can mentor and train community members in digital communication skills reminds me of the old saying that it is better to teach a man how to fish than to give him fish! I would like to wish all the other participants on the course (we are the first freshman graduates!) all the very best in their future work and lives and finally say, stay connected!

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