- jointrefugeeaction
Announcing the next JRAN Forum - this May!
Updated: May 21, 2021
Coaching and mentoring in and for the refugee sector
Wednesday May 26th 2021, 3.30pm - 6.00pm
This Forum has been put together to show that mentoring/coaching is a journey - not a one off opportunity. You can do it when you are young, when you are starting a business, and when you are employed. You can give back after you have done it. It is not a straight line.
We’ll show lots of examples and then pull together the common threads. We want you to hear from voices that you won’t have heard from before. and some that you may have heard from, as well as make new connections with each other!
Programme Overview:
We're pleased to give you a brief overview of the sessions and the contributors:
Introduction: Keynote speaker: Lord Alf Dubs
Session 1. Youth-led programmes: How to involve young people effectively and keep them involved. Contributors: Safe Passage and Coram.
Session 2: How mentoring can help to create successful entrepreneurs. Contributors: Project SIREE and TERN.
Session 3: Celebrating mutual mentoring: What does successful reverse mentoring look like? How do we turn the mentee into a mentor? Contributors: Routes Collective.
Session 4: Stories from the sector: How can coaching help people with lived experience? Contributors: Result CIC and mentees from Choose Love and the May Project Gardens
Session 5: Workshops: Discussing key needs and possible solutions
Interested to attend?
Any questions about the event? Email: jointrefugeeactionnetwork@gmail.com
We look forward to seeing you soon - online!
Our contributors
Find out more about the people and organisations taking part in this Forum.
Keynote speaker: Lord Alf Dubs is a Labour politician and leading refugee rights advocate. Formerly the MP for Battersea and Director of the Refugee Council, Alf was appointed as a Labour life peer in 1994.
In 2016, he sponsored an amendment to the Immigration Act 2016 to offer unaccompanied refugee children safe passage to Britain, having himself arrived in Britain in 1939 as a six-year-old refugee fleeing the Nazis in Czechoslovakia. Alf is now campaigning alongside Safe Passage to encourage the government to accept 10,000 unaccompanied refugee children over the next 10 years
Session 1: Youth-led Programmes
Safe Passage: Working in the UK and across Europe through a combination of campaigning and legal casework, Safe Passage exists to help child refugees access safe, legal routes to sanctuary. Safe Passage Young Leaders was launched at the beginning of 2020 to provide a platform for young refugees to speak out about issues they care about and develop skills in campaigning and advocacy.
Coram:
Amy Spiller is Programme Manager of Coram’s Young Citizens Programme and leads on co-production at Coram. She has 13 years’ experience leading and co-ordinating projects with young people to get their voices heard on issues they care about.
Djamila Bulakio, Young Citizens Trainer, will also be speaking with Amy Spiller. Djamila is a Young Citizens Trainer at Coram. She uses her experiences to support other refugee and migrant young people to navigate the care system and asylum process and to build positive lives in the UK.
Young Citizens is Coram's award-winning programme for young people from migrant and refugee backgrounds aged 16-25. Young Citizens Trainers use their experiences to co-design and run workshops for other young people who are new to the country. They deliver peer mentor training, giving other young people the skills to support their peers and training for professionals on how to support the young people they work with.
Session 2: How mentoring can create successful refugee entrepreneurs
SIREE (Social Integration of Refugees through Education and Self Employment)
Speakers
1. Heval Erdemli - founding director of Sound of Refugees & Asylum Seekers, (SOAR) CIC. She's recently entered the market as a pop-up shop offering discounted products to refugees & asylum seekers, having run a successful crowdfunder for £1,000.
A Kurdish female refugee, Heval Erdemli has been in the UK since 2017. An architecture graduate studying in Turkey, she has over 10 years planning professional experience in local authority planning departments. Heval has also been a regeneration chair person (elected councillor 2004-2009); an human rights activist (Human Rights Association 2004-2007, brancrep-Human Rights Association - 2004-2016 membership); and was involved in women and environmental projects. and contributed to fundraising for the Ezidi (Yazidi) people in Turkey.
SOAR CIC is committed to helping and supporting asylum-seekers and people with refugee status to feel welcome in the UK. It is a a brand-new small community organisation aiming to support the needs of refugees & asylum-seekers in London. SOAR is working to improve access to opportunities for employment, education & training, and cheap or free clothing and products.
2. Amr Sabbah, founder of Nitt Gritt: Amr is an ambassador and champion at The Entrepreneurial Refugee Network (TERN) and has been running SIREE’s entrepreneurship network. Amr designs and delivers programs using cutting edge research in social and positive psychology, complemented with a mindful and encouraging facilitation style. He has a Masters in Positive Psychology and a Bachelor of Business Administration, and previously worked as an analyst at JP Morgan & Consultant at Europe Arab Bank.
Nitt Gritt: Help organisations unlock their human potential. By utilising the science of positive psychology with the art of mindful facilitation, they inspire sustained change within systems and people. A community and social tech startup, with a focus on connecting people through meditation, the organisation believes in combining the benefits of healthy, genuine social connections and the practice of meditation.
Session 3: Creating Multi Directional Mentoring
Routes: a social enterprise supporting women with experience of the UK asylum system. One of their core programmes is a mentoring programme. This is designed for mutual impact: they support mentees from refugee and asylum seeking backgrounds to reach their personal and professional goals, grow in confidence, develop new skills and expand their networks; while training and supporting professional mentors across sectors to become inclusive, impactful and compassionate leaders. To achieve this mutual impact, they champion a non-directive and multi-directional approach to mentoring.
Session 4: Stories from the Sector
Result CIC is a social enterprise led by directors with experience of having lived experience of racism, being disabled and other experiences of marginalisation . They bring this to their work as personal development trainers and coaches.
'Resilience beyond crisis' was a programme of three workshops and four coaching sessions for 12 social leaders in the migration and refugee sector: a group disproportionately affected by Covid-19 with many reporting isolation and little access to support to help them lead their communities through the crisis.
Speakers:
Hormoz Ahmadzadeh is the co-director of Result CIC. In 2009, Hormoz completed diplomas in Personal Development and Executive coaching from the Coaching Academy, accredited by the International Coaching Federation. Hormoz uses his lived experiences of several aspects of his identity to inform his work, including his experiences of being an immigrant and a refugee.
His career has included education, marketing, sales, electronics engineering in oil exploration, and training and coaching. His experience includes several years in business development as an executive and then a manager. During this time, he worked for global companies like 3M and in IT Training, for New Horizons who are the largest franchised IT training company in the world. He then went on to work at Manchester Business School Worldwide as their Corporate Development Manager, helping establish a new centre in Dubai amongst other responsibilities.
Aside from developing Result CIC’s work, his activities include delivering Personal Effectiveness workshops to managers and leaders at private sector organisations as a freelance training facilitator for Simitri Group International, a global training, coaching and consultancy company. He was most recently an associate coach for the Clore Social Leadership/Lived Experience (LEx) Movement online leadership programme for Migrants and Refugees.
In May 2019 he became a trustee of 42nd Street, a charity working with children and young people living with mental health issues aged 11-25. He has been a coaching volunteer for entrepreneurial Young People for UpRising, a youth development organisation and was a Coaching volunteer and later associate for Coaching Inside and Out (CIAO) at Styal Women’s Prison and then at Kirkham Prison.
Jane Cordell is co-director of Result CIC. She has worked as a professional musician, lecturer editor. Deaf since her mid-20s, she was the first ever deaf person to work in the British Diplomatic Service at senior level. Jane has worked in Finland and Poland, Chaired DaDaFest (Deaf and Disability Arts) for 4 years and is a Board member for the Arts Marketing Association. She was made an honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University in 2018 for her services to disability rights.
Mentees
Farah AlHaddad is from Damascus, Syria and works for Choose Love. She has worked in the international NGO sector in research, education and programme delivery, with a focus on refugees and asylum seekers.
Farah was awarded multiple scholarships, culminating in obtaining a MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) specialising in Women, Peace and Security Studies. She now lives in London and works at Choose Love; a global relief movement that provides emergency assistance and long-term solutions to refugee crises in fifteen different countries. Farah is also a member of an all-women’s dance company called ‘Hawiyya’ [identity].
Mona Bani was born in Denmark to Iranian political refugees and moved to the UK as a teenager. With over a decade's experience in social justice, she's authored Demos reports on UK youth policy and far-right extremism in Denmark; been a policy adviser to the Cabinet Office; programmes director for Every Voice UK; consultant to Help Refugees and worked in the refugee camp in Calais.
She's now co-director for the award-winning grassroots organisation May Project Gardens, working with marginalised urban communities, particularly unaccompanied young refugees and has been selected for the 2020 Clore Social Leadership programme for leaders in the UK Refugee Sector.
Interested to attend?
Any questions about the event? Email: jointrefugeeactionnetwork@gmail.com
We look forward to seeing you - online!