38 degrees does have its uses. Their “Refugees Welcome” campaign allows you to go their website, enter your postcode and see if their is a current “Refugees welcome in -name of town or city-” petition for your locality. If there is, you can sign it if you want to. If there isn’t one for your area, you can just hit the red button to “start a campaign” and you can set up a petition for your home town, village or city, and then publicise it via Twitter, Facebook, email etc.
The Guardian has a list of ways you can help refugees. – As does The Independent.
My eye has been caught by these two refugee-related good causes:
- Refugee Action helps refugees and asylum seekers build new lives in the UK. They take donations of old cars, mobile phones and printer cartridges and also ask for support in other ways.
- The Worldwide Tribe is a small grassroots group, recently formed, who are using crowdsourcing to provide food, clothing and shelter for people in the Calais refugee camp. The Guardian describes the group:
The ethos behind the group…is “We are all the same. The world is our home and we believe it is imperative to have a global mindset and conscience.” Its Facebook page, where the Worldwide Tribe’s work is documented, has more than 21,000 likes. And the team of seven people, aged between 18 and 39, has raised more than £50,000 in a week.
The group formed on 2 August when the friends, from Tunbridge Wells, decided to make a documentary to counteract the negative portrayal of the refugees in the media. With the aim of illustrating the human stories in Calais’s camp, the Worldwide Tribe started a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter to fund the filming. Four days later it had raised the £18,000 needed. Overwhelmed by the response, the group decided to set up a JustGiving page to help with the relief effort. Their total already exceeds £41,000.
(It’s now up to £109,000+)
Edit from Caron:
I hope Paul doesn’t mind me muscling in on his post, but there have been some initiatives that I thought was worth highlighting.
Jade O’Neil, who has written for this site before, is planning a trip to Calais with a car full of supplies. You can support her effort here. They are already looking at expanding the project after meeting their original target in less than a day. They have been in touch with organisations in Calais to make sure that they are bringing stuff that is actually needed.
Manda Rigby has set up a petition asking the supermarkets to help organise aid. One idea she’s had is for them to add a feature to their websites enabling shoppers to buy items for Calais which would then be put into a convoy from the UK. Sign here if you agree.
Jane Dodds took a van load of clothes for the people in Calais from Montgomeryshire in Wales:
Driving a van load of clothes from kind people in Montgomeryshire to Dover for refugees in Calais. Diolch/Thankyou pic.twitter.com/8nocymn45E
— Jane Dodds (@DoddsJane) August 29, 2015
Please use the comments thread to tell us about your favoured ways of helping refugees.
* Paul Walter is a Liberal Democrat activist and member of the Liberal Democrat Voice team. He blogs at Liberal Burblings.
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4 Comments
Of course 38 Degrees “has its uses”. Just because in certain cases it has had the temerity to criticise the Lib Dems…. shock horror – does not mean we should be tribal and continue to hurl snide comments at it. It, and Avaaz, serve a valuable function of highlighting establishment blocks on change, or areas where corporate or governmental actions are causing harm. As “campaigning” Lib Dems, we should be praising them, not the reverse. Surely, their ethos fits in well with our opposition to entrenched vested interests? That is not the same as saying all of us would sign every single petition they raise.
STEPS IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION. Won the Topical Question spot in the Lords this coming Tuesday – Refugee Crisis.Also Govt agree to a full debate in the Lords on Refugee crisis on Wednesday, September 16th. Really delighted that we have these important opportunities. Thanks to everyone who supported us.
@Paul Walter
Signing an on-line petition is all well and good, but as you probably know, West Berkshire is not a “dispersal area” so, as things stand, the chances of any of these refugees turning up in your neighbourhood are remote. The same can be said for Caron’s area – the only dispersal area in Scotland at present is Glasgow. Up to now, would-be refugees have been sent mostly to the north of England, where Bolton and Rochdale together have more asylum seekers than the entire south east of England.
I think this is quite an important point, because one of the reasons the whole asylum system has come in to such disrepute in recent years has been the way in which a small number of areas (virtually always socially deprived) have been expected to accommodate large numbers while much more affluent areas have taken none. If the system’s reputation had not become so tarnished in the first place, it would not have taken so much effort to persuade people to accept more refugees from Syria, so it’s really important to get the dispersal of refugees right this time if we are to avoid an even worse hardening of (some of) the public’s attitudes in the future.
I am delighted that Liberal Democrats are taking direct action to undermine the heartlessness and institutional xenophobia of the Cameron regime.
Nothing characterises this loathsome government more than the Old Etonian with his face caked in TV make-up telling us at the beginning of this week that he was not going to let a single person into the country and then by Friday he was so “concerned” he was going to let “thousands” in.
He meant 4,000 apparently. Which is 5 people for every member of The House of Lords.
If those people who shared a class at Eton with our Prime Minister opened up their spare properties and bedrooms to refugees you accommodate all 4,000 quicker than you could organise a ride in the woods with Rebekah Brooks.
Clothes and food to Calais will help counter the media moguls’ attempts to demonise the small numbers of people attempting to cross to England.