Building refugees conversation and confidence

The student winners of UCL Advances? inaugural Social Enterprise Project of the Year award lead the UCL Refugee Project. Noor Alyassin (UCL Biochemical Engineering) and Yasmin Grewal (UCL Geography) explain the difference they have made by helping refugees build conversation skills and confidence through the Refugee Advice and Support Centre (RASC). ?The Refugee Project aims to help integrate those who are struggling with adapting to life in the UK and help improve their language skills. The clients who we work with are usually from Ethiopian, Somalian, Eritrean, and Afghani origins and come with little knowledge of the UK and its cultures. We visit the Refugee Advice and Support Centre (RASC) once a week with a group of enthusiastic volunteers, and host activities which aim to encourage conversation and to build vocabulary as well as confidence. Once relationships have become stronger between the volunteers and the RASC members, we organise and fund educational and social trips around London, such as visits to museums, a guided boat trip across the Thames, or trips to tourist attractions such as the London Eye. These aim to help the RASC members learn about the culture of London and to enable integration. As a group we have also organised a variety of workshops ­? for example, we became aware that some of the members have difficulty using the Underground, so during the following session we went through the tube map and practised going to different destinations.