Over the last year, our team of consultants have worked with a number of clients in the migration sector, including The Refugee Buddy Project, Beyond Detention, Migrants in Culture, Care4Calais, Migrants Organise the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Unbound Philanthropy. 

We’ve offered a wide range of support, including messaging development, communications strategy, theory of change development, process design, event coordination and facilitation. 

Our highlights have included: 

🚀 Organising the Shared Ground Fund Residential, a two-day conference for groups from across the sector, with the Paul Hamlyn Foundation

🚀 Facilitating a roundtable on recent campaign wins from the movement with Unbound Philanthropy

🚀 Creating new organisational messaging for The Refugee Buddy Project 

🚀 Delivering a communications strategy for Beyond Detention

So what have we learnt from our work in the movement? 

💡 There is an incredible amount of work happening in the sector, to provide essential support for people seeking refuge in the UK. Organisations working on the ground are grappling with challenging questions around inclusion, effectiveness and centering lived experience, whilst battling the hostile environment and trying to exist sustainably during a cost of living crisis.

💡 There continue to be tensions in the values and approaches taken by different actors in the sector. This is an inevitability with any movement. Conflict exists, and it surfaces when people are brought together to connect and share their viewpoints. Time and attention need to be spent in order to accommodate and support conflict in a way that enables the sector to move forward.

💡 Shrinking space for civil society is a concern for many organisations. Greater government restrictions on protest threaten to decrease the tactics at people’s disposal to enact change, at a time when government policies are increasingly hostile towards people seeking refuge in the UK.

💡 Language around migration, like many social change issues, is constantly evolving. This presents a challenge for small service-driven organisations, who are working at capacity to provide practical support.

💡 The importance of joy and creativity are being increasingly recognised. Doing this work is tough. The importance of fostering joy and creativity to support the wellbeing and resilience of the movement cannot be overstated, and will help it to stay alive long into the future.

We’ve loved developing our expertise in the migration movement and supporting clients to further their impact and create vital change for people seeking refuge.